riskability

Pearl Jam Wishlist : Hajer Alkhatib - Syria هاجر الخطيب سوريا

2011-07-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

مرتزقة الجزيرة والتلفيق على ليبيا وتركيا والاسلام

2011-07-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

2011-07-04T11:37:00.000-07:00

Editor Silenced, With the Help of Unreliable Sources

2011-04-09T20:52:00.000-07:00

MANAMA, Bahrain

FOR years, Mansour al-Jamri led what was, by all accounts, a charmed life.

Having returned to Bahrain a decade ago at the personal invitation of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, he enjoyed a certain degree of immunity from government pressures, even when the prosperous, independent newspaper he started, Al Wasat, made things uncomfortable for a minister or two.

In the last two months of rising tensions and violence, his was a voice of moderation, urging both the Sunni royal family and leaders of the predominantly Shiite protest movement to sit down and compromise. He wrote columns criticizing government repression and corruption, and others condemning moves by protesters to march on the royal palace and barricade the country’s main highway — acts that eventually provoked a sweeping crackdown over the last three weeks.

But suddenly, Mr. Jamri found himself out of a job, forced to quit last weekend to keep Al Wasat open. He now spends his days clearing out his office and preparing to face prosecutors on Monday. They have accused him of publishing false stories to incite Shiites to rise up against the government.

“They have taken away my baby,” said Mr. Jamri, who says the false stories were planted. “When they touch and attack Al Wasat, it is a message to everybody that there is a new Bahrain. They are re-engineering the country.”

Speaking out extensively for the first time since his arrest, he said on Friday that he did not want to consider what could happen to him next. In an interview conducted in part in a car as his wife nervously drove around the city trying to avoid military roadblocks, he said he received threatening text messages every day, and when he called back he was greeted with taunts inflected with mock Shiite slang expressions.

Mr. Jamri is the mild-mannered son of the late Sheik Abdul-Amir al-Jamri, once a fiery Shiite protest leader whose photograph is still hung prominently in the meeting rooms of Shiite activists. But Mr. Jamri, now 49, took a different path from his father. He became a mechanical engineer and made the rare personal choice of marrying a Sunni woman of Western tastes who is also a journalist.

He lived and worked in Britain for 20 years before returning to Bahrain at a time when the royal family was trying to finesse a political opening after a previous period of unrest and repression.

He was offered a position in the cabinet, but he decided instead to build Al Wasat, and it has since become the most profitable and only major independent newspaper in this tiny island country. Al Wasat distinguished itself from other newspapers and government television by covering the opposition parties, particularly when they pressed the government over charges that senior officials were buying up beachfront property at rock-bottom prices.

However, over the last few days, after a one-day shutdown and Mr. Jamri’s resignation, Al Wasat has undergone a thorough makeover, emerging as a mouthpiece for the government.

Under a new emergency law, criticism of the government is grounds for closing not only newspapers, but political parties as well.

This week, the government shut the offices of the Waad, a liberal opposition party, and arrested the deputy of the top leader who is himself already in jail. Professional medical and educational associations have been closed in recent days, and four doctors and nurses who have treated wounded demonstrators have been arrested this week, bringing to 11 the number who have been seized since the crackdown began, according to the organization Physicians for Human Rights.

As Mr. Jamri tells the story, his troubles have been building ever since March 14, when the military and masked thugs attacked masses of demonstrators camped out in the central Pearl Square, and Saudi troops entered the country to bolster conservatives in the royal family. “I mediated between the two sides, and both sides used me to reach common ground until March 15,” he said.

Early that morning masked men wielding swords and clubs broke into Al Wasat’s press room and seriously damaged the printing presses. Masked men continued to surround the building over the next week, preventing employees from going to work without a police escort. Mr. Jamri wrote the interior minister asking for a meeting, but got no response. Reporters and editors started working from home, leaving the newsroom understaffed, particularly late at night

In early April, over a three- or four-day period, e-mails with stories and photographs began surfacing in Al Wasat’s system. They were cleanly written with notes saying they had been edited, and even included a phone number. They were relatively small stories — a person fainting after being beaten at a police checkpoint, a young man being assaulted by unknown assailants

The catch was that the stories and photographs were taken from other news outlets, some from other countries, with names of people who did not exist. The picture of a car with smashed windows, said to be owned by a doctor attacked by unknown assailants, was actually a car owned by a pro-government member of Parliament whose car suffered damage during last year’s election campaign.

“They were believable news,” Mr. Jamri said. “You see my wife panicking at a checkpoint; people are getting harassed every day. They were not unbelievable, not like stories of explosions of buildings.”

Last Saturday night, pro-government Bahrain TV broadcast what it called an investigative report charging that Al Wasat “deliberately targeted the security and stability of the Kingdom of Bahrain.”

The report said, “It did this by disseminating false news and reporting fabricated events regarding security developments in the Kingdom of Bahrain.” The broadcast highlighted the published stories and photographs next to the original versions in other news media.

“The guy made a mistake,” Mr. Jamri said of a newsman who ran with the stories. “The guy pumped them right to the layout guys, without editors.” He said computer experts had found that all the false stories came from one company in a neighboring Arab country. He said he would identify the company only to the prosecutors when given the chance next week.

“It was the last thing that crossed my mind, that they would attack my presses and then plant things,” he said.

International human rights groups have taken up Mr. Jamri’s cause. The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement saying it “condemns the Bahraini government’s strong-arm tactics, which effectively forced a change in a prominent paper’s editorial management.”

Local activists are incensed. “Someone working for the Ministry of Interior put the information in the paper and knew it was wrong,” charged Mohammed al-Maskati, president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights. “They wanted him to quit, and the paper has totally changed.”

Bahrain TV has not backed away from its charges, and the government Information Affairs Authority has characterized Bahrain TV’s reporting as fair and thorough. The Bahrain News Agency has posted the fabricated stories on its Web site, with links to the photographs and original reports from which they came.

Last Sunday, the day after the Bahrain TV broadcast, Al Wasat was prohibited from publishing. Mr. Jamri and two other senior editors resigned that night, in hope that the paper could be saved. The next day the paper was allowed to publish and was temporarily edited by two Iraqi editors.

But on Monday, the two Iraqi editors were summoned to the Information Affairs Authority, and then taken to the National Security Agency for seven hours of questioning, according to Mr. Jamri. After they refused to testify that Mr. Jamri deliberately published false information, Mr. Jamri said, they and their families were escorted to the airport and deported without their belongings.

Mr. Jamri says he has not even begun to think about his future. “I’m trying to recover from the shock,” he said. “They are sending a message that nothing is untouchable in Bahrain

ثورة الحرية في سوريا: اربعاء (15) شهيد في درعا

2011-03-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

الجزيرة: احمد سعيد "النكسة" هزيلا واعور دجلا وخائن

2011-03-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

Doubts raised about effectiveness of U.N.-sanctioned no-fly zone

2011-03-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/WashingtonPost/Content/Epaper/2011-03-23/Ax8.pdf

ليبيا ترمي باسم الله طائرة معتدية فتسقطها

2011-03-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

الجزيرة تعهر المهنة وتهدر الحق والكرامة وتطحن الامهات

2011-03-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

الجزيرة تمتطي القرضاوي كولي سفيه لقطر والدنمارك

2011-03-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

Battle for Benghazi بنغازي عشية العدوان على ليبيا

2011-03-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

تدمير ليبيا لتسويق احدث الاسلحة وتفاهة الجزيرة

2011-03-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

اوباما : لا للعدوان الفرنسي البريطاني القطري على ليبيا

2011-03-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

ثورة الحرية في اليمن تتقدم بالشهداء والمخلصين للوطن

2011-03-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

ليبيا تدحض بالاسلام فقه القرضاوي القطري المصالح

2011-03-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

ليبيا موحدة في مواجهة قطر: اولاد الكلب الخونة

2011-03-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

ثورة الحرية في سوريا: صعبة جدا وليست مستحيلة

2011-03-22T12:49:00.001-07:00

ثورة الحرية في سوريا: صعبة جدا وليست مستحيلة

2011-03-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

دليل صريح: الجزيرة قتلت علي حسن الجابر

2011-03-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

القذافي يرد على العدوان بشرعية الدفاع عن النفس

2011-03-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

ليبيا وموقف الكوريدور الاسرائيلي - الايراني : قطر

2011-03-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

ليبيا ومحور الشيطان: بريطانيا - فرنسا - قطر - الدنمارك

2011-03-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

الجزيرة الجابر كلينتون وشهيد ليبيا الحرة محمد نابوس

2011-03-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

موقف تاريخي لامريكا بخصوص ثورة الحرية في ليبيا

2011-03-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

114 غارة في اليوم الاول لحرب عدوانية طويلة على ليبيا

2011-03-19T20:12:00.000-07:00

العدوان الفرنسي البريطاني على ليبيا لاجهاض الحرية

2011-03-19T11:42:00.000-07:00

العدوان البريطاني الفرنسي على ليبيا انفرادي وانتهازي

2011-03-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

فرنسا تقصف وبريطانيا تتأهب لاحتلال اجرامي لليبيا

2011-03-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

فرنسا تقصف ليبيا تمهيدا لاحتلال اجرامي

2011-03-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

الله اكبر: ليبيا تسقط طائرة معتدية بريطانية - فرنسية

2011-03-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

الجزيرة سكسي لتسويق جريمة احتلال ليبيا كما العراق

2011-03-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

اوباما: لن نرسل قوات امريكية لليبيا ولن نستخدم القوة

2011-03-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

ثورة الحرية في سوريا: درعا وبقية المدن

2011-03-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

ثورة الحرية في اليمن: 50 شهيد في يوم واحد

2011-03-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

The Imperial President

2011-03-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

The president's speech was disturbingly empty. There are, it appears, only two reasons the US is going to war, without any Congressional vote, or any real public debate. The first is that the US cannot stand idly by while atrocities take place. Yet we have done nothing in Burma or the Congo and are actively supporting governments in Yemen and Bahrain that are doing almost exactly - if less noisily - what Qaddafi is doing. Obama made no attempt to reconcile these inconsistencies because, one suspects, there is no rational reconciliation to be made.

Secondly, the president argued that the ghastly violence in Libya is destabilizing the region, and threatening world peace. Really? More than Qaddafi's meddling throughout Africa for years? More than the brutal repression in Iran? And even if it is destabilizing, Libya is not, according to the Obama administration itself, a "vital national interest". So why should the US go to war over this?

None of this makes any sense, except as an emotional response to an emergency. I understand the emotions, and sympathize with the impulse to help. But I can think of no worse basis for committing a country to war than such emotional and moral anxiety. One fears this is Bill Clinton's attempt to assuage his conscience over Rwanda, rather than Obama's judicious attempt to navigate the Arab 1848. And as Obama said things like "Qaddafi has a choice," did you not hear echoes of Bush and Saddam?

At least Bush argued that Saddam posed a threat to the US. No one can seriously argue that Qaddafi poses such a threat. To launch a war on these grounds is to set a precedent that would require a kind of gobal power and reach that not even the most righteous neocons have pushed for. And I look forward to the actual Arab contributions to the military action. Presumably Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be involved. Or will it be what we now have - Qatar and, er, that's it? The Arab League has no real skin in this game. And one suspects, in the end, the narrative will be America bombing the Arabs again. How many civilians might the US kill in such an action? More civilians than we are currently killing in Pakistan and Afghanistan? Have we learned nothing?

The proper response to this presidential power-grab is a Congressional vote - as soon as possible.

That will reveal the factions that support this kind of return to the role of global policeman, and force the GOP to go on the record. I also look forward to the statements of the various Republican candidates in support of this president.

But it seems clear enough: exactly the same alliance that gave us Iraq is giving us Libya: the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into. I do not doubt their good intentions and motives. No human being can easily watch a massacre and stand by. Yet we did so with Iran; and we are doing so in Yemen and Bahrain as we speak, and have done so for decades because we rightly make judgments based on more than feeling.

A congressional vote is also important to rein in the imperial presidency that Obama has now taken to a greater height then even Bush. No plane should lift off, no bomb released, until the Congress has voted. I don't see why Obama should oppose this. He needs some Congressional support in an open-ended military commitment to ensure the protection of civilians in Libya

As U.N. Backs Military Action in Libya, U.S. Role Is Unclear

2011-03-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations Security Council voted Thursday to authorize military action, including airstrikes against Libyan tanks and heavy artillery and a no-fly zone, a risky foreign intervention aimed at averting a bloody rout of rebels by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

After days of often acrimonious debate, played out against a desperate clock, as Colonel Qaddafi’s troops advanced to within 100 miles of the rebel capital of Benghazi, Libya, the Security Council authorized member nations to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians, diplomatic code words calling for military action.

Diplomats said the resolution — which passed with 10 votes, including the United States, and abstentions from Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India — was written in sweeping terms to allow for a wide range of actions, including strikes on air-defense systems and missile attacks from ships. Military activity could get under way within a matter of hours, they said.

Benghazi erupted in celebration at news of the resolution’s passage. “We are embracing each other,” said Imam Bugaighis, spokeswoman for the rebel council in Benghazi. “The people are euphoric. Although a bit late, the international society did not let us down.”

The vote, which came after rising calls for help from the Arab world and anguished debate in Washington, left unanswered many critical questions about who would take charge, what role the United States would play and whether there was still enough time to stop Colonel Qaddafi from recapturing Benghazi and crushing a rebellion that had once seemed likely to drive him from power. After the vote, President Obama met with the National Security Council to discuss the possible options, European officials said. He also spoke by telephone on Thursday evening with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the White House said.

Speaking on a radio call-in show in Tripoli before the vote, Colonel Qaddafi raised the level of urgency on the vote, saying that his forces would begin an assault on Benghazi that night.

“We will come house by house, room by room. It’s over. The issue has been decided,” he said, offering amnesty to those who laid down their arms. To those who continued to resist, he vowed: “We will find you in your closets. We will have no mercy and no pity.”

After the Security Council’s vote, Libya’s deputy foreign minister, Khalid Kaim, said at a news conference in Tripoli early on Friday morning that the Qaddafi government welcomed the resolution’s calls for the protection of civilians, which he insisted his government had always sought. But he warned against foreign countries’ trying to arm the rebels. “That means they are inviting Libyans to kill each other,” he said.

Mr. Kaim said the Qaddafi government was ready for a cease-fire with the rebels, “but we need to talk to someone to agree on the technicalities of the decision.” And he declined to address the possibility that the government’s forces were continuing to push swiftly toward Benghazi.

James M. Lindsay, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said of the Security Council’s decision: “It’s going to be tougher to stop Qaddafi today than it was a week ago. The issue is not going to be settled in the skies above Benghazi, but by taking out tanks, artillery positions and multiple-launch rocket systems on the ground.”

Mr. Lindsay said that would require helicopter gunships and other close-in support aircraft rather than advanced fighter planes. Other analysts said repelling Colonel Qaddafi’s forces might require ground troops, an option that has been ruled out by senior American officials.

A Pentagon official said Thursday that decisions were still being made about what kind of military action, if any, the United States might take with the allies against Libya. The official said that contingency planning continued across a full range of operations, including a no-fly zone, but that it was unclear how much the United States would become involved beyond providing support.

That support is likely to consist of much of what the United States already has in the region — Awacs radar planes to help with air traffic control should there be airstrikes, other surveillance aircraft and about 400 Marines aboard two amphibious assault ships in the region, the Kearsarge and the Ponce.

The Americans could also provide signal-jamming aircraft in international airspace to muddle Libyan government communications with its military units.

A European diplomat said that Britain and France were still waiting to hear what role the United States would take in any military action in Libya. “One decision that needs to be made,” he said, “is whether there will be a command and control operations in Britain or in France.”

Beyond that, the diplomat said that officials in Britain, France and the United States were all adamant that Arab League forces take part in the military actions and help pay for the operations, and that it not be led by NATO, to avoid the appearance that the West was attacking another Muslim country.

The United States has played a complicated role in the debate over military involvement, initially expressing great reluctance about being drawn into another armed conflict in a Muslim country but subsequently unnerved by the reports of Colonel Qaddafi’s gains.

But diplomats said the moral imperative of protecting civilians from Colonel Qaddafi and the political imperative of United States not watching from the sidelines while a notorious dictator violently crushed a democratic rebellion had helped wipe away lingering doubts.

Characterizing Colonel Qaddafi as a menacing “creature” lacking a moral compass, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the international community had little choice but to act. “There is no good choice here. If you don’t get him out and if you don’t support the opposition and he stays in power, there’s no telling what he will do,” Mrs. Clinton said from Tunisia on Thursday.

She went on to say Qaddafi would do “terrible things” to Libya and its neighbors. “It’s just in his nature. There are some creatures that are like that.” Her remarks, applauded by the studio audience where she appeared, amounted to the administration’s most stridently personal attacks on the Libyan leader, echoing President Ronald Reagan’s “mad dog of the Middle East.”

The resolution — sponsored by Lebanon, another Arab state, and strongly backed by France, Britain and the United States — explicitly mentions the need to protect civilians in the rebel stronghold Benghazi, “while excluding an occupation force.” It calls to “establish a ban on all flights in the airspace” and an immediate cease-fire.

Mrs. Clinton said Thursday that establishing a no-fly zone over Libya would require bombing targets inside the country to protect planes and pilots. She said other options being considered included the use of drones and arming rebel forces, though not ground troops, an option that appeared to be ruled out Thursday by the State Department’s highest-ranking career diplomat, Under Secretary William J. Burns.

The vote was also a seminal moment for the 192-member United Nations and was being watched closely as a critical test of its ability to take collective action to prevent atrocities against civilians. Diplomats said the specter of former conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, when a divided and sluggish Security Council was seen to have cost lives, had given a sense of moral urgency to Thursday’s debate. Yet some critics also noted that a no-fly zone authorized in the early 1990s in Bosnia had failed to prevent some of the worst massacres there, including the Srebrenica massacre.

The resolution stresses the necessity of notifying the Arab League of military action and specifically notes an “important role” for Arab nations in enforcing the no-fly zone. Diplomats said Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were considering taking a leading role, with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt also considering participating.

The participation of Arab countries in enforcing a no-fly zone has been seen as a prerequisite for the United States, keen not to spur a regional backlash. Diplomats said debate on the resolution had been contentious, with Russia and China reluctant to support military intervention. The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, also opposed military action and called for tougher sanctions.

Security Council members said they were aware that military units loyal to Colonel Qaddafi were surrounding the strategically located town of Ajdabiya and massing for a push up the road to the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, 100 miles away

Bahrain Calls a State of Emergency

2011-03-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

MANAMA, Bahrain—Bahrain declared a three-month state of emergency and handed wide powers to the armed forces, as it moved to quell weeks of demonstrations by mainly Shiite protesters a day after the arrival of Saudi troops.

Bahrain also temporarily withdrew its ambassador from Tehran, after Iran described the arrival of the troops as an "occupation."

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia denied a report that a protester shot and killed one of its soldiers.

Bahrain television reported a member of the security forces had died after being run over by a protester. The government said the state of emergency gives Bahrain's army and security forces a mandate "to take the measures and procedures necessary to preserve the safety of the nation and its people." Bahrain has seen clashes over the past few days between security forces, antigovernment demonstrators and pro-regime loyalists, marking an escalation of tensions in the strategic Arab Gulf state, where a swelling number of protesters have taken control of the key financial district and are calling for the downfall of the monarchy.

On Tuesday, members of opposition groups reported clashes in Sitra and Shiite and Sunni villages near the capital between pro-government and antigovernment parties.

"There have been attacks in six villages," said Abdul Khalil, a senior member of the moderate Al Wefaq party. "They [pro-government mobs] attacked the Shia and Sunni villages. They had guns and security forces had to use tear gas. This is a terrible and complicated situation."

Underlining growing U.S. concerns about deteriorating security, the Pentagon said Tuesday it authorized the departure, on a voluntary basis, of nonemergency civilian personnel and service members' families.

Bahrain's six formal opposition parties and secular groups issued a statement late Tuesday condemning emergency law and the widespread attacks on mainly Shiite communities outside of the capital. "The political opposition parties and the Federation of Trade Unions denounce the state of emergency declared by the regime and the escalation of the security situation and the use of the military to resolve a political crisis caused by the regime itself," said a translation.

It also denounced the "military and civil militias that brutally attack unarmed civilians in their homes and villages," which it said reinforced its call to the international community to "protect the Bahraini people from the brutality of the security forces and domestic and international armies."

Members of Bahrain's opposition Monday had appealed to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for help, amid a growing crisis in the country.

Meanwhile, opposition members said hopes for dialogue were fading. "We can't start dialogue with violence everywhere in the country," said Mr. Khalil. "We don't need more guns. Security forces from Gulf countries will put oil on the fire."

"I don't think there is room for dialogue," said Abdul AlSingace, a senior figure in the hard-line Haq movement. Foreign troops in Bahrain will provoke protesters into further acts of "civil disobedience," he said.

The White House on Tuesday called for "calm and restraint" on all sides.

The U.S. hopes to avoid further escalation. At a news conference in Cairo, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern about the violence in Bahrain, adding that "all sides must take steps now to negotiate toward a political solution." She said she had expressed similar concerns in a telephone conversation Tuesday with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.

The State Department dispatched Jeffrey Feltman, acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, to Bahrain.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that Mr. Feltman's "message is that there is no military solution to the problems in Bahrain. A political solution is necessary and all sides must now work to produce a dialogue that addresses the needs of all of Bahrain's citizens

Arabs Rise, Tehran Trembles

2011-03-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

By KARIM SADJADPOUR

Published: March 5, 2011

IN “Garden of the Brave in War,” his classic memoir of life on a pomegranate farm in 1960s Iran, the American writer Terence O’Donnell recounts how his illiterate house servant, Mamdali, would wake him every morning with a loud knock on the door and a simple question: “Are you an Arab or an Iranian?”

“If I was naked,” O’Donnell explained, “I would answer that I’m an Arab and he would wait outside the door, whereas if I was clothed I would reply that I was an Iranian and he would come in with the coffee.” This joke went hand in hand, O’Donnell wrote, with an age-old chauvinism that depicted the Persians’ Arab neighbors as “uncivilized people who went about unclothed and ate lizards.”

The Islamist victors of the 1979 Iranian revolution intended to change things, to replace the shah’s haughty Persian nationalism with an Arab-friendly, pan-Islamic ideology. Yet Tehran’s official reaction to the 2011 Arab awakening shows that, at the heart of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Middle East strategy, there is a veiled contempt for Arab intelligence, autonomy and prosperity.

What many young Iranians see as a familiar struggle for justice, economic dignity and freedom from dictatorial rule, Iranian officialdom has struggled to spin as a belated Arab attempt to emulate the Islamic revolution and join Tehran in its battle against America and Israel.

The delusions of the Iranian regime are partly attributable to a generation gap. Tehran’s ruling elite continue to cling to the antiquated ideology of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose worldview was formed by decades of imperial transgressions in Iran. The demographic boom in the Middle East, however, has brought a wave of young Arabs and Iranians who associate subjugation and injustice not with colonial or imperial powers, but with their own governments.

Until now, Iran’s interests have been served by the Arab status quo: frustrated populations ruled over by emasculated regimes incapable of checking Israel, and easily dismissed as American co-dependents. A conversation I once had with a senior Iranian diplomat is instructive.

He complained, justifiably, about Washington’s excessive focus on military power to solve political problems. I posed a simple hypothetical: What if, instead of having spent several billion dollars financing Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the past three decades, Iran had spent that money educating tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites to become doctors, professors and lawyers? Wouldn’t those communities now be much better off and in a much stronger position to assert their rights vis-à-vis Israel?

“What good would that have done for Iran?” he responded candidly. (He himself had a doctorate from a British university.) “Do you think if we sent them abroad to study they would return to southern Lebanon and Gaza to fight Israel? Of course not; they would have remained doctors, lawyers and professors.”

Iran, in essence, understands that it can inspire and champion the region’s downtrodden and dispossessed, but not the upwardly mobile. Its strategy to dominate the Middle East hinges less on building nuclear weapons than on the twin pillars of oil and alienation.

Iranian petrodollars are used to finance radicals — Khaled Meshaal in Syria, Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq, to name a few — who feed off popular humiliation. As an Arab Shiite friend once complained to me, “Iran wants to fight America and Israel down to the last Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi.”

At first glance, the fall of Western-oriented Arab governments may appear to be a blow to Washington and a boon for Tehran. The seeming consensus among Western analysts and pundits — that Iran will fill the Middle East power vacuum — is short-sighted.

While the relationship between Egypt and Iran — the region's two oldest and most populous nations — will likely improve, the competition between them will likely intensify

Tehran’s ascent in the Arab world over the last decade has been partly attributable to Cairo’s decline. The potential re-emergence of a proud, assertive Egypt will undermine Shiite Persian Iran’s ambitions to be the vanguard of the largely Sunni Arab Middle East. Indeed, if Egypt can create a democratic model that combines political tolerance, economic prosperity and adept diplomacy, Iran’s model of intolerance, economic malaise and confrontation will hold little appeal in the Arab world

Renewed Iranian influence in places like Bahrain and Yemen may also prove self-limiting. As we have seen in Iraq, familiarity with Iranian officialdom often breeds contempt. Polls have shown that even a sizable majority of Iraq’s Shiites resent the meddling in their affairs by their co-religionists from Iran. “The harder they push,” said Ryan Crocker, a former United States ambassador to Iraq, “the more resistance they get.”

Elsewhere in the Arab world, Iranian proxies like Hezbollah will increasingly find themselves in the awkward position of being a resistance group purportedly fighting injustice while simultaneously cashing checks from a patron that is brutally suppressing justice at home.

The Arab uprisings of 2011 will also, of course, have their effect on Iran internally. Iranian democracy advocates have long taken solace in the belief that they were ahead of their Arab neighbors, who would one day too have to undergo the intolerance and heartaches of Islamist rule. The largely secular nature of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia have bruised the Iranian ego: were they the only ones naïve enough to succumb to the false promise of an Islamic utopia?

It has been said about authoritarian regimes that while they rule their collapse appears inconceivable, but after they’ve fallen their demise appears to have been inevitable. In the short term Tehran’s oil largesse and religious pretensions have seemingly created for it deeper, if not wider, popular support than many Arab regimes.

But the regime’s curiously heavy-handed response to resilient pro-democracy protests — including the recent disappearance of opposition leaders Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi — betrays its anxiety about the 21st-century viability of an economically floundering, gender-apartheid state led by a “supreme leader” who purports to be the prophet’s representative on Earth.

Tehran publicly cheered the fall of Egyptian and Tunisian regimes undone by corruption, economic stagnation and repression. Do its rulers not know that Iran — according to Transparency International, Freedom House and the World Bank — ranks worse than Tunisia and Egypt in all three categories?

A saying often attributed to Lenin best captures the sorts of tectonic shifts taking place in today’s Middle East. “Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens; and then sometimes weeks pass and decades happen.”

The uprisings may not all end happily. As history has shown time and again — notably in Iran in 1979 — minorities that are organized and willing to use violence can establish reigns of terror over unorganized or passive majorities. Whatever ensues, however, the Arab risings have revealed that Iran’s revolutionary ideology has not only been rendered bankrupt at home, but it has also lost the war of ideas among its neighbors

Karim Sadjadpour is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace*

Al Qaeda "Aljazeera" vs Qaddafi

2011-03-16T07:53:00.001-07:00

By Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai

This rebellion is the fresh breeze they’ve been waiting years for,” says an Afghan Taliban operative

The terror cell sees Gaddafi’s bloody civil conflict as the perfect chance to swoop in and turn the war-torn country into an Islamic state

Exiled Libyans with connections to Al Qaeda are racing to find ways to send people home, in hope of steering the anti-Gaddafi revolt in a radical Islamist direction, according to several senior Afghan Taliban sources in contact with Al-Qaeda.

This rebellion is the fresh breeze they’ve been waiting years for,” says an Afghan Taliban operative who helps facilitate the movement of Al Qaeda militants between the tribal area and Pakistani cities. “Some say they are ready to go back at this critical moment.” The operative, who has just returned from Pakistan’s lawless tribal area on the Afghanistan border, adds: “They realize that if they don’t use this opportunity, it could be the end of their chances to turn Libya toward a real Islamic state, as Afghanistan once was.”

So far, Muammar Qaddafi’s clumsy efforts to blame Al Qaeda for the popular uprising against his dictatorship would be a joke, if only he weren’t using that claim as an excuse for mowing down so many Libyans. In fact, it’s been many years since Libya has seen significant numbers of radical Islamists—or any other organized opposition, for that matter. Nearly all have been killed, locked up or chased into exile years ago by the regime’s secret police and security forces. Although the country’s most feared insurgent entity, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (known in Arabic as Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya), has been seeking to topple Gaddafi since the early 1990s, it’s unlikely that more than a handful who pledge allegiance to Osama bin Laden remain inside Libya.

Seizing the moment, however, Al Qaeda’s top ranking Libyan, Abu Yahya al-Libi, the movement’s senior Islamist ideologue and bin Laden’s head of operations for Afghanistan, broke his public silence over the Libyan revolt this past weekend. He issued a call to arms to his countrymen in a 30-minute video that was posted on Al Qaeda-linked Internet sites, urging Libyans to fight on and do to Qaddafi what he has done to them over the years: kill him. "Now it is the turn of Qaddafi [to die] after he made the people of Libya suffer for more than 40 years," he said. “Retreating will mean decades of harsher oppression and greater injustices than what you have endured." He also called for the institution of Islamic law once an Arab nation has cast off its former, Western-supported rulers. Overthrowing these Western-backed Arab regimes, he added, was "a step to reach the goal of every Muslim, which is to make the word of Allah the highest

Several Libyans have held top roles in Al Qaeda’s leadership. Some traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets and stayed, eventually teaming up with bin Laden after his return from Sudan in 1996. Taliban sources estimate there were some 200 Libyans with bin Laden in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Since then some of bin Laden’s senior-most operational aides have been Libyans. One was Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was captured by Pakistan forces in 2005 and is now a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay; another was Abu Lais al-Libi, his replacement as Al Qaeda’s third in command, who died in a U.S. Predator attack in 2008. Apart from his hard-line sermons and jihadist exhortations that are widely distributed on DVD and posted on jihadist Website, Yahya may be be best known for his daring escape along with four [make that three other] other Al Qaeda prisoners from the high-security lockup at the American airbase at Bagram in July 2005.Yahya, who is believed to be in his late 40s, is smarter, more charismatic, a more articulate speaker and a more learned Islamic scholar than either Faraj or Lais, according to Afghan Taliban sources.

Now he’s said to be eager to go home, like most other Libyans in the Afghan borderlands. “They desperately want to at least get a foothold in the new Libya,” the Taliban facilitator says. The long, dangerous trip from Pakistan’s tribal areas to Libya—via Afghanistan, Iran, Iraqi Kurdestan and Turkey—can take weeks if not months. Nevertheless, at least one Taliban source says Yahya made the trip two years ago and returned safely, although no one else seems able to confirm that story. And even if he or other Al Qaedea Libyans manage to get home again, the Taliban facilitator says they know they’ll have a tough time influencing the largely prodemocracy uprising. “They know they must tread cautiously, and not push too hard, for too much, too soon,” he says. Instead, he says, they expect to take a moderate line at first, while quietly trying to persuade rebel leaders that the preservation of Libyan sovereignty against Western “colonialists” depends on taking an anti-Israeli, anti-American line. Any move toward imposing Islamic sharia law, Yahya’s specialty, will have to come later.

Still, Taliban sources say, if Yahya is successful in reaching rebel-held territory inside Libya, at least he’ll be able to operate with relative freedom, without worrying about Gaddafi’s secret police. There’s one question: will bin Laden grant leave to Al Qaeda’s senior operations man for Afghanistan to undertake such a hazardous journey? The betting among the Taliban is that he will—and he may already have a replacement in mind. “Al Qaeda will not leave this place empty,” says the facilitator.

Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, Al Qaeda and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.

*Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America

Al-Qaida Commander Calls For Islamic Rule In Libya

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO March 13, 2011, 09:40

A top Libyan al-Qaida commander has urged his countrymen to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi's regime and establish Islamic rule, expanding the terror network's attempts to capitalize on the wave of unrest sweeping the region.

Abu Yahia al-Libi, al-Qaida's Afghanistan commander, said in a video posted on a militant website that after the fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, it is now Gadhafi's turn, as rebel fighters there press a nearly monthlong campaign to oust him.

Those nation's autocratic governments — enemies of Islamic militants — practiced "the worst kind of oppression" with the backing of the West and had failed to heed the lessons of history, he said.

"Now it is the turn of Gadhafi after he made the people of Libya suffer for more than 40 years," he said, adding that it would bring shame to the Libyan people if the strongman were allowed to die a peaceful death.

A transcript of the video was provided Sunday by SITE Intelligence Group, a U.S. organization that monitors militant messages.

Gadhafi has accused al-Qaida of being behind the movement seeking to end his more than 40-year rule, though the rebels have no known links to the terrorist organization. The uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia were similarly driven by widespread popular outrage at corruption, unemployment and limited outlets for political expression, rather than Islamist fervor. Nevertheless, al-Qaida has tried to make gains on the tumult, also urging formation of an Islamic government in Egypt.

Libya's Gadhafi was once demonized for sponsoring various terrorist groups and attacks like the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. But in the late 1990s, the Libyan leader began efforts to emerge from international pariah status and stopped sheltering terrorists.

Gadhafi also crushed his country's Muslim militants, including those who fought in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden, and banned clergymen from expressing political opinions in their Friday sermons. Gadhafi has also helped the U.S. track al-Qaida and other terrorism suspects in the region.

Since then, top al-Qaida figures have routinely targeted him in their video and audio recordings.

Al-Libi said ousting Western-backed Arab regimes was "a step to reach the goal of every Muslim, which is to make the word of Allah the highest" and establish Islamic rule.

The al-Qaida commander, whose nom de guerre is Arabic for "the Libyan," rose to prominence in the terror group after escaping from the U.S. military prison at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2005.

He is believed by Western and Afghan intelligence to have run training camps for suicide bombers and fighters in eastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan. Afghan police said at the time of his escape that his real name is Abulbakar Mohammed Hassan and that he is a Libyan.

The authenticity of his 31-minute video could not be verified, but it was produced by As-Sahab, the media wing of al-Qaida, and posted late Saturday on militant websites.

He also criticized the United States, asking how it could ultimately voice support for the uprisings after having backed the regimes they toppled.

"We have to get rid of our inferiority complex and free ourselves from the West," he said.

His message came days after a North African offshoot of al-Qaida called on Muslims to support the uprising.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb said in a statement posted on a militant website last month that it would do whatever it can to support the revolt against Gadhafi, calling him a "criminal tyrant," but it gave no specifics.

The group, based in neighboring Algeria, may be seeking to capitalize on the revolt to gain recruits or win support among Libyans

Libya dispatch: Momentum

2011-03-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

Abu Ray March 14, 2011 at 11:56 AM

A second dispatch from Libya from Abu Ray, who's been very, very close to the action.

"I came here to cover a revolution, not a war," said one photographer in disgust after a particularly bad day on the front. Many of those covering this conflict have been surfing from one Middle East uprising to the last and as exhausting as it’s been, it’s also been an uplifting story of peoples peacefully overcoming nasty repressive governments. Until now.

In Egypt and Tunisia the militaries balked from shooting their own people and in the end presidents had to go. In Bahrain, a mercenary military and police were finally restrained by a country that needs world opinion on its side.

None of those strictures existed in Libya where the army was weak and did divide over killing civilians, but was offset by brigades of shady security forces and mercenaries that stayed loyal to Moammar Gadhafi and were ok with shooting people in the streets..

We arrived in Tobruk and Benghazi into a barely restrained carnival of euphoria and over the next three weeks watched the fits and starts of a fledgling state. Eastern Libya and its string of “liberated” cities did not dissolve into chaos or tribalism as some had predicted, calling Libya with its complex web of clan ties as “North Africa’s Somalia.”

Instead it remained peaceful, generous to outsiders and incredibly earnest about building something new in land ruled for four decades by a destructive whim suspicious of any normal social or civic institutions.

Perhaps some sort of shaky future lay ahead for this nascent Free Libya, but we’ll never know because the empire struck back and today it all seems in peril. I leave now with the feeling of a retreat. Qadhafi’s forces, backed by the overwhelming force of tanks and rockets, are rolling back rebel gains and making their way east.

At the time of writing, they are still probably 200 kilometers from Benghazi and don’t really have the forces for any kind of protracted siege of a major metropolis but the momentum now feels like it’s on the government side and in Benghazi and Ajdabiya, closer to the front, tensions are high. They are blaming the journalists they once welcomed for somehow giving them away and some are digging out their old Qadhafi pictures and giving them a polish.

“It is just like the Spanish Civil War,” said Raoul, a Spanish TV journalist, “like Homage to Catalonia.” Benghazi in this scenario becomes civil war Barcelona, with an exuberant explosion of revolutionary thinking and fervor that is eventually crushed under the boot of the fascist armies after it turns out enthusiasm doesn’t beat out lots of equipment on the front.

I had a lot of respect for Raoul, he tended to have a good take on the situation, and besides he was captured and beaten up by Russian Special Forces in Georgia, which has to count for something.

It’s not a bad parallel for what the front was like either. There were maybe 1,500 to 2,000 rebel forces out on the field by some wildly unsubstantiated estimates we made, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the government had even less, fighting out of Qadhafi’s home town of Sirte in the middle of the country.

What they lacked in numbers, though, they made up in gear and on March 6, when the triumphant rebel forces hit the tiny coastal town of Bin Jawwad they were greeted with a curtain of tank shells and rockets. Every time their mad rushes on pickup trucks with heavy machine guns bolted on the back were stopped cold by a steady thump of high explosives.

Afterwards, talking with rebels about their experiences, it was always about the hail of “Jerads”, the local word for Grad rockets, also known as Katyushas, though after a while I had the feeling there was a sinister French fellow named Gerard who was messing everything up for them.

“We just don’t have the means,” said one young recruit, kitted out in mismatched camouflage as he cleaned the desert sands out of his puny Kalashnikov after being driven back hundreds of kilometers from Bin Jawwad.

After Bin Jawwad, the war just became a gradual slog backwards as government forces moved forward slowly but inexorably behind a wall of rockets, each time driving the rag tag rebels army further back.

Talking to the volunteers and the occasional member of the defected military fighting on the rebel side, there was always talk of rebels regrouping and waiting for the heavy weapons to come up from Benghazi.

In some ways, the wait was understandable, the rebel army never expected to start pushing west against Qadhafi’s forces, they had to sit down and figure out what tanks they had, who could drive them, and what ranks meant in the new army _ and for that matter, how they were going to feed everybody.

But the eager volunteers didn’t give them time. Everyone grabbed a Kalashnikov and a beret, wrapped a keffiyeh around their neck and rushed off to the front in a pickup truck. And for a while it worked, until it didn’t.

A few heavy rocket launchers made their way from the rebel side to the front, but apparently not enough to counteract the government barrages and some journalists even saw a few tanks fighting for the revolution. They also saw a couple crash into each other.

Nothing seemed to make a difference and as the government forces moved forward a few dozen kilometers every day, the volunteers disappeared leaving just a few units of the defected military to hold the line.

I spent days at the front, different little towns that in normal times wouldn’t have been more than a passing blur in a fast moving desert car, but now represented hard won gains or unattainable goals.

At Ras Lanouf, an oil refinery town, a kind of rebel village evolved, with people sleeping outside by their trucks at the checkpoint or “liberating” the housing of evacuated foreign oil workers, surviving on a diet of tuna sandwiches, twinkies and biscuits brought up from Benghazi for the fighters.

Somehow, one of the most difficult logistical problems of any army, feeding its men, seemed to work here on a system of volunteers who just bought food, threw it into a pickup truck and dropped it off at rebel checkpoints where it was given out.

Disconcertingly, a lot of it seemed to be junk food, especially those awful cream wafer things and sugary juice boxes, but occasionally apples and bananas made an appearance and of course lots of dates.

Hanging out at the checkpoints on a sunny day was almost fun, despite the occasional burst of fire from an overexcited teenager manning a bulky 14.5mm anti aircraft gun. Except for the air strikes.

I think it will be a while before I feel comfortable with the distant sound of an airplane again. You would hear the familiar buzz of a high flying aircraft and everyone would panic, diving for their cars, opening up with their machine guns, occasionally stupidly firing noisy short range rocket propelled grenades pointlessly into the sky.

The actual aircraft was always a little ahead of the noise, so it was hard to see them and sometimes they would just circle, other time the noise from the unseen plane would get louder and louder and suddenly a massive plume of dust and sand would erupt in the distance and sometimes closer by.

The airstrikes never really did anything, they never actually seemed to hit an important target and weren’t nearly as effective as those awful rockets and artillery shells but they were scary in their randomness and all the rebels kept asking me where the no fly zone was. Where was Obama? How the hell should I know, I’m here running around like a chicken with its head cut off with the rest of you.

Up from Ras Lanouf was the front, which in the final days was a distant rumbling thing with far plumes of smoke as the two sides traded rockets. One day they hit the oil storage facilities at the Sidra oil terminal and the sky filled with pitch black smoke sparked with rolling fireballs.

Several times those days, we would watch from far away, trying to figure out what was going on a shall would whizz crash into the side of the road not a few dozen meters from us. Once you hear or see a shell crash you know you survived, But it’s hard to feel all that comforted.

It all just felt so random, some days the rockets fell far away, other days nearby.

The photographers were always crazy. I remember walking down a hill once following a group of photographers into a valley of death and chaos marked by oil fires and plumes of distant explosions as dusk neared. It was a nightmare scene but they kept walking, pausing only when they saw two rebel fighters taking a break to pray in the desert.

A half dozen photographers then piled on them, shooting two men in keffiyehs praying with their guns besides them against a backdrop of a burning sky. Moving image, no doubt.

It was usually impossible to find anyone in charge at the front, just kids with guns and a lot of bile for Qadhafi, but occasionally a grizzled officer would make an appearance with heartening words about the imminent arrival of heavy weapons, and some private comments about how difficult it was to instill any sense of discipline or order in the chaotic forces.

The rebel forces seemed to move as an inchoate mob of group think, and it just wasn’t enough. So every day, despite talk of counterattacks and secret weapons, the front moved back day by day, until Ras Lanouf fell and then Brega.

“It is back and forth, that is a desert war,” said Abdel Fatah Younes, the sketchy former interior minister who switched sides at the beginning of the uprising and later became the rebel defense minister. Except that it just seemed to be going back.

I don’t think Qadhafi’s forces will be rolling into Benghazi any time soon, but if things keep going the way they are now, they will eventually regroup sufficiently and take back the east. And then I don’t know what will happen to all those people who for a month enjoyed a Libyan spring, spray painting satiric pictures of Qadhafi on the walls of buildings, waving the old monarchy flag and telling everyone how much of a murderous killer he was.

How do you go back to the silence, lies and mistrustful shiftiness of the last 40 years after that without going utterly mad

Fighting Qaddafi With A Piece Of Paper

2011-03-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

Niall Ferguson

The Cold War ended not because the United States achieved a military edge over the Soviet Union, but because the legitimacy of the Soviet system collapsed from within. Our role was to insist on the importance of those “human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Even if not all our allies in the Cold War always upheld them, the other side respected them less

Mr. President, don't send guns to the Libyans. Send them a piece of paper. In this week's Newsweek, Niall Ferguson has a message for Obama—take advice from President Gerald Ford. Yes, President Ford.

President Obama is reluctant to intervene in the bloody civil war now under way in Libya. As a senior aide told The New York Times last week, "He keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic." I like that notion of organic revolutions—guaranteed no foreign additives, exclusive to Whole Foods. I like it because, like so much about this administration, it is both trendy and ignorant.

Was the American Revolution "completely organic"? Funny, I could have sworn those were French ships off Yorktown. What about Britain's Glorious Revolution, the one that established parliamentary rule? Strange, I had this crazy idea that William III was a Dutchman.

Eight of the 35 countries that signed the Final Act were communist. Yet it contained the following startling words:

The participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion… The participating States will respect the equal rights of peoples and their right to self-determination.

So accustomed were the Soviet authorities to lying that they saw no harm in subscribing to these pledges. Indeed, the Final Act was reprinted in full in Pravda. But for dissidents inside the Soviet Bloc like the physicist Andrei Sakharov or the Czech playwright Václav Havel, Helsinki represented a huge stick with which to beat their persecutors.

The Cold War ended not because the United States achieved a military edge over the Soviet Union, but because the legitimacy of the Soviet system collapsed from within. Our role was to insist on the importance of those "human rights and fundamental freedoms." Even if not all our allies in the Cold War always upheld them, the other side respected them less.

Why have we failed to learn from that success? Why have we allowed a mockery to be made of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which numbered Libya among its members until just the other day and still includes Saudi Arabia, not to mention China and Cuba?

Memo to the president: Organic revolutions, just like your Whole Foods arugula, need sunlight and watering. It's time for a new Helsinki, aimed at discrediting all of today's unfree states, starting with the four I've just named.

*Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November

Is China Next: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

2011-03-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

Will the protests that have swept the Middle East inspire a similar movement in China, or is that country's middle class more interested in the material than the political

Over the course of three short months, popular uprisings have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, sparked a civil war in Libya and created unrest in other parts of the Middle East. They also have raised a question in many people's minds: Are all authoritarian regimes now threatened by this new democratic wave? In particular, is China, a rising superpower, vulnerable to these forces?

The Communist government in Beijing is clearly worried. It has limited news coverage of the recent uprisings and has clamped down on democratic activists and foreign reporters, acting pre-emptively against anonymous calls on the Internet for China to have its own "Jasmine Revolution." A recent front-page editorial in the Beijing Daily, an organ of the city's party committee, declared that most people in the Middle East were unhappy with the protests in their countries, which were a "self-delusional ruckus" orchestrated by a small minority. For his part, President Hu Jintao has urged the strengthening of what has been dubbed the "Great Firewall"—the sophisticated apparatus of censorship and surveillance that the regime uses to control access to the Internet.

No social scientist or intelligence analyst predicted the specific timing or spread of the Arab uprising—the fact that it would start in Tunisia, of all places, that it would be triggered by an event like the self-immolation of a vegetable seller, or that protests would force the mighty Egyptian army to abandon Hosni Mubarak. Over the past generation, Arab societies have appeared stolidly stable. Why they suddenly exploded in 2011 is something that can be understood only in retrospect, if at all.

But this doesn't mean that we can't think about social revolutions in a more structured way. Even unpredictable things take place in a certain context, and the present-day situations of China and the Middle East are radically different. Most of the evidence suggests that China is pretty safe from the democratic wave sweeping other parts of the world—at least for now.

Perhaps the most relevant thinker for understanding the Middle East today and China tomorrow is the late Samuel Huntington—not the Huntington of "The Clash of Civilizations," who argued that there were fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and democracy, but the Huntington whose classic book "Political Order in Changing Societies," first published in 1968, laid out his theory of the development "gap."

Observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Huntington noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers. This could be explained, he argued, by a gap between the newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people and their existing political system—that is, between their hopes for political participation and institutions that gave them little or no voice. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor in such a society; they tend to be led, instead, by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity.

All of these observations would seem to apply to Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries have made substantial social progress in recent decades. The Human Development Indices compiled by the United Nations (a composite measure of health, education and income) increased by 28% for Egypt and 30% for Tunisia between 1990 and 2010. The number of people going to school has grown substantially; Tunisia especially has produced large numbers of college graduates. And indeed, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were led in the first instance by educated, tech-savvy middle-class young people, who expressed to anyone who would listen their frustrations with societies in which they were not allowed to express their views, hold leaders accountable for corruption and incompetence, or get a job without political connections.

Mr. Huntington stressed the destabilizing power of new social groups seeking political participation. People used to be mobilized by newspapers and radio; today they are spurred to action by cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, which allow them to share their grievances about the existing system and to learn about the possibilities of the larger world. This change in the Middle East has been incredibly rapid, and it has trumped, for now, old verities about the supposed passivity of Arab culture and the resistance of Islam to modernization.

But do these remarkable developments tell us anything about the possibility for future instability in China?

It is certainly true that the dry tinder of social discontent is just as present in China as in the Middle East. The incident that triggered the Tunisian uprising was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart repeatedly confiscated by the authorities and who was slapped and insulted by the police when he went to complain. This issue dogs all regimes that have neither the rule of law nor public accountability: The authorities routinely fail to respect the dignity of ordinary citizens and run roughshod over their rights. There is no culture in which this sort of behavior is not strongly resented.

This is a huge problem throughout China. A recent report from Jiao Tong University found that there were 72 "major" incidents of social unrest in China in 2010, up 20% over the previous year. Most outside observers would argue that this understates the real number of cases by perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude. Such incidents are hard to count because they often occur in rural areas where reporting is strictly controlled by the Chinese authorities.

The most typical case of outraged dignity in contemporary China is a local government that works in collusion with a private developer to take away the land of peasants or poor workers to make way for a glittery new project, or a company that dumps pollutants into a town's water supply and gets away with it because the local party boss stands to profit personally. Though corruption in China does not reach the predatory levels of certain African or Middle Eastern countries, it is nonetheless pervasive. People see and resent the privileged lives of the nation's elite and their children. The movie "Avatar" was a big hit in China in part because so many ordinary Chinese identified with the indigenous people it portrayed whose land was being stolen by a giant, faceless corporation

There is, moreover, a huge and growing problem of inequality in China. The gains from China's remarkable growth have gone disproportionately to the country's coastal regions, leaving many rural areas far behind. China's Gini index—a standard measure of income inequality across a society—has increased to almost Latin American levels over the past generation. By comparison, Egypt and Tunisia have a much more equal income distribution.

According to Mr. Huntington, however, revolutions are made not by the poor but by upwardly mobile middle-class people who find their aspirations stymied, and there are lots of them in China. Depending on how you define it, China's middle class may outnumber the whole population of the United States. Like the middle-class people of Tunisia and Egypt, those in China have no opportunities for political participation. But unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts, they have benefited from a dramatically improving economy and a government that has focused like a laser beam on creating employment for exactly this group.

To the extent that we can gauge Chinese public opinion through surveys like Asia Barometer, a very large majority of Chinese feel that their lives have gotten better economically in recent years. A majority of Chinese also believe that democracy is the best form of government, but in a curious twist, they think that China is already democratic and profess to be satisfied with this state of affairs. This translates into a relatively low degree of support for any short-term transition to genuine liberal democracy.

Indeed, there is some reason to believe that the middle class in China may fear multiparty democracy in the short run, because it would unleash huge demands for redistribution precisely from those who have been left behind. Prosperous Chinese see the recent populist polarization of politics in Thailand as a warning of what democracy may bring.

The fact is that authoritarianism in China is of a far higher quality than in the Middle East. Though not formally accountable to its people through elections, the Chinese government keeps careful track of popular discontents and often responds through appeasement rather than repression. Beijing is forthright, for example, in acknowledging the country's growing income disparities and for the past few years has sought to mitigate the problem by shifting new investments to the poor interior of the country. When flagrant cases of corruption or abuse appear, like melamine-tainted baby formula or the shoddy school construction revealed by the Sichuan earthquake, the government holds local officials brutally accountable—sometimes by executing them.

Another notable feature of Chinese government is self-enforced leadership turnover. Arab leaders like Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Mr. Mubarak and Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi never knew when to quit, hanging on 23, 30 and 41 years, respectively. Since Mao, the Chinese leadership has rigidly adhered to terms of about a decade. Mr. Hu, the current president, is scheduled to step down in 2012, when he is likely to be replaced by Vice President Xi Jinping. Leadership turnover means that there is more policy innovation, in sharp contrast to countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which have been stuck for decades in the rut of crony capitalism.

The Chinese government is also more clever and ruthless in its approach to repression. Sensing a clear threat, the authorities never let Western social media spread in the first place. Facebook and Twitter are banned, and content on websites and on China-based social media is screened by an army of censors. It is possible, of course, for word of government misdeeds to get out in the time between its first posting by a micro-blogger and its removal by a censor, but this cat-and-mouse game makes it hard for a unified social space to emerge.

A final critical way in which China's situation differs from that of the Middle East lies in the nature of its military. The fate of authoritarian regimes facing popular protests ultimately depends on the cohesiveness and loyalty of its military, police and intelligence organizations. The Tunisian army failed to back Mr. Ben Ali early on; after some waffling, the Egyptian army decided it would not fire on protesters and pushed Mr. Mubarak out of power.

In China, the People's Liberation Army is a huge and increasingly autonomous organization with strong economic interests that give it a stake in the status quo. As in the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, it has plenty of loyal units around the country that it could bring into Beijing or Shanghai, and they would not hesitate to fire on demonstrators. The PLA also regards itself as the custodian of Chinese nationalism. It has developed an alternative narrative of 20th-century history that places itself at the center of events like the defeat of Japan in the Pacific war and the rise of a modern China. It is very unlikely that the PLA would switch sides and support a democratic uprising.

The bottom line is that China will not catch the Middle Eastern contagion anytime soon. But it could easily face problems down the road. China has not experienced a major recession or economic setback since it set out on its course of economic reform in 1978. If the country's current property bubble bursts and tens of millions of people are thrown out of work, the government's legitimacy, which rests on its management of the economy, would be seriously undermined.

Moreover, Mr. Huntington's scenario of rising but unfulfilled expectations among the middle class may still play out. Though there is a labor shortage among low-skill workers in China today, there is a glut of the college educated. Every year into the future, China will graduate more than seven million people from its universities, up from fewer than a million in 1998, and many of them are struggling to find work suitable to their self-perceived status. Several million unemployed college graduates are far more dangerous to a modernizing regime than hundreds of millions of poor peasants.

There is also what the Chinese themselves call the "bad emperor" problem. China's historical achievement over the centuries has been the creation of high-quality centralized bureaucratic government. When authoritarian rulers are competent and reasonably responsible, things can go very well. Indeed, such decision-making is often more efficient than in a democracy. But there is no guarantee that the system will always produce good rulers, and in the absence of the rule of law and electoral checks on executive power, there is no way to get rid of a bad emperor. The last bad emperor, commonly (if quietly) acknowledged as such, was Mao. We can't know what future tyrant, or corrupt kleptocrat, may be waiting in the wings in China's future.

The truth is that, much as we might theorize about the causes of social revolution, human societies are far too complex, and change too rapidly, for any simple theory to provide a reliable guide. Any number of observers dismissed the power of the "Arab street" to bring about political change, based on their deep knowledge of the Middle East, and they were right every year—up until 2011.

The hardest thing for any political observer to predict is the moral element. All social revolutions are driven by intense anger over injured dignity, an anger that is sometimes crystallized by a single incident or image that mobilizes previously disorganized individuals and binds them into a community. We can quote statistics on education or job growth, or dig into our knowledge of a society's history and culture, and yet completely miss the way that social consciousness is swiftly evolving through a myriad of text messages, shared videos or simple conversations.

The central moral imponderable with regard to China is the middle class, which up to now has seemed content to trade political freedom for rising incomes and stability. But at some point this trade-off is likely to fail; the regime will find itself unable to deliver the goods, or the insult to the dignity of the Chinese people will become too great to tolerate. We shouldn't pretend that we can predict when this tipping point will occur, but its eventual arrival, as Samuel Huntington might have suggested, is bound up with the very logic of modernization itself.

—Mr. Fukuyama is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His new book, "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution," will be published next month

Veering From Peaceful Models, Libya’s Youth Revolt Turns Toward Chaos

2011-03-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

RAS LANUF, Libya — It is a bromide of dictators like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi that they stand as the only bulwark against forces of chaos and religious militancy. The tragedy of Libya’s uprising, its genesis in peaceful protests over a government’s disdain for its people, is that Colonel Qaddafi’s own brutal repression from Tripoli east to Ras Lanuf and beyond may make the platitudes reality

The protests upending the Arab world have ranged from the climactic success of protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, to the brutal crackdowns in Syria, whose government forced just a handful of demonstrators to sign pledges never to protest again, and to the uneasy standoff in Bahrain between Shiite protesters and a Sunni royal family. Libya has begun to emerge as its own model — the darker side of the forces unleashed this year by the immolation of a young man in the Tunisian hinterland.

Everyone here seems to have a gun these days, in a lawlessness tempered only by revolutionary ebullience. Young men at the front parade with the swagger that a rocket-propelled grenade launcher grants but hint privately that they will try to emigrate if they fail. Anti-American sentiments build, as rebels complain of Western inaction. And the hint of radicalization — religious or something more nihilist — gathers as the momentum in the three-week conflict clearly shifts to the forces of one of the world’s most bizarre leaders.

“This better not go on any longer,” said Dr. Salem Langhi, a surgeon who was working around the clock at a hospital that was abandoned as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces rushed in. “It will only bring misery and hard feelings among people. Losing lives and limbs doesn’t make anyone optimistic.”

No one seems to know what to call this conflict — a revolution, a civil war or, in a translation of what some call it in Arabic, “the events,” a shorthand for confusing violence. It certainly looks like a war — the thud of shelling in the distance offers a cadence to occasional airstrikes, their targets smoking like oil fires that turn afternoon to dusk. The dead and dismembered are ferried in ambulances driven by medical students.

But especially for the rebels, there is an amateurishness to the fighting that began as a protest and became an armed uprising.

“We’re here because we want to be,” said one of the fighters, Mohammed Fawzi.

His sense of a spontaneous gathering offers a prism through which to understand the war: the front at Ras Lanuf is the most militarized version of Tahrir Square in Cairo, where hundreds of thousands wrote a script of opposition and street theater that brought down a strongman everyone thought would die in office. The fighting here feels less like combat in the conventional sense and more like another form of frustrated protest.

Some vehicles bear the inscription Joint Security Committee, but nothing is all that coordinated across a landscape that seems anarchic and lacking in leadership. Fighters don leather jackets from Turkey, Desert Fox-style goggles, ski masks, cowboy hats and World War II-era British waistcoats.

Slogans are scrawled in the street just miles from the fighting. “Muammar is a dog,” one reads. A man who bicycled for three days from Darnah, far to the east, became a local celebrity at the front. Free food is offered, as it was in the canteens in Tahrir, and fighters rummaged through donated clothes. “These are American jeans!” one shouted.

Young men revel in the novelty of having no one to tell them not to play with guns. “God is great!” rings out whenever a volley of bullets is fired into the air.

“Some guys consider this a lot of fun, and they’re hoping the war lasts a lot longer,” said Marwan Buhidma, a 21-year-old computer student who credited video games with helping him figure out how to operate a 14.5-millimeter antiaircraft battery.

An hour or so before Friday’s headlong retreat, a gaggle of young men in aviator sunglasses and knit caps danced on military hardware, thrusting weapons into the air

“Where is the house of the guy with really bad hair?” they chanted, referring to Colonel Qaddafi, jumping on spent cartridges and empty milk cartons. “Let’s go down the road and see it!”

The protests across the Arab world have disparate demands — from power-sharing in Bahrain to the dismantling of the regime in Egypt. But the demographic shift they represent as a generation comes of age is their constant. It is no different in Libya, where the young look at their parents’ lives in disgust and vow that they will not live without dignity, a say in their future and a constitution — a catchall term for the rule of law.

Nearly 70 percent of Libya’s population is under the age of 34, virtually identical to Egypt’s, and a refrain at the front or faraway in the mountain town of Bayda is that a country blessed with the largest oil reserves in Africa should have better schools, hospitals, roads and housing across a land dominated by Soviet-era monotony.

“People here didn’t revolt because they were hungry, because they wanted power or for religious reasons or something,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Dihami, a young man from Benghazi who had spent days at the front. “They revolted because they deserve better.”

The seeming justice of that revolt has prompted moments of naïveté — time and again, young people express amazement that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces would deploy tanks and warplanes against them — with an incipient and unpredictable frustration over demands unmet.

The revolt remains amorphous, but already, religion has emerged as an axis around which to focus opposition to Colonel Qaddafi’s government, especially across a terrain where little unites it otherwise. The sermon at the front on Friday framed the revolt as a crusade against an infidel leader. “This guy is not a Muslim,” said Jawdeh al-Fakri, the prayer leader. “He has no faith.”

Deserting officers have offered what leadership there is, along with some men who call themselves veterans of fighting in Afghanistan or an Islamist insurgency in eastern Libya in the 1990s. The shift remains tentative — and far short of the accusations made by Colonel Qaddafi that he faces an insurgency led by Al Qaeda — but even the opposition acknowledges the threat of radicalization in a drawn-out conflict.

Dr. Langhi, the surgeon, said he scolded rebels who called themselves mujahedeen — a religious term for pious fighters. “This isn’t our situation,” he pleaded. “This is a revolution.”

Sitting on ammunition boxes, four young men from Benghazi debated the war, as they watched occasional volleys of antiaircraft guns fired at nothing. They promised victory but echoed the anger heard often these days at the United States and the West for failing to impose a no-flight zone, swelling a sense of abandonment. Salah Mughrabi, a 24-year-old chemical engineer without a job, pondered what might follow their defeat.

“You can’t imagine the fire that’s going to come,” he said. “Fire.”

The sense of citizenship and empowerment was one of the most remarkable legacies of Egypt’s uprising. Young people there often made the point that they no longer thought about emigration to Persian Gulf states or the West now that they had a country to build.

None of the four men here wanted to stay in Libya. Mr. Mughrabi and a friend planned to go to America, another to Italy. The last said Afghanistan. Each described the litany of woes of their parents — 40 years of work and they were consigned to hovels.

“My father has nothing,” Mr. Mughrabi said. “And I ask you: Why?”

Across the street was the antiaircraft battery of Mr. Buhidma, the video gamer.

His features were too soft for the street’s martial cast, and his eyes welled up as he recalled two friends killed in Benghazi at the start of the uprising. He said he missed television and complained of the hooligans at the front who had stolen guns and cars.

“Some of them are cowards,” he said. “Let’s say traitors.”

A week before, he and a friend had caught a ride to the front, picking up a deserting officer along the way in Adjadbiya to lead them. Patriotism, he said, was his motivation, but he wondered whether he was willing to die in a war.

“I really haven’t made my decision yet,” he said. “I’ll let fate decide.”

Men piled ammunition into pickups that advanced to the front and retreated from it. “God is great and to him praise,” shouted some as they caught rides. Cars careered past that read variously “Popular Army,” “Free Libyan Army” and “The Army of Feb. 17.” As on past days, hours more awaited before fighting began in the afternoon.

“I don’t know what to call this,” Mr. Buhidma said, his voice earnest. “Do you consider this war, or civil war, or religious war? It’s confusing to me, very confusing. I don’t know

الجزيرة تهدر دم الجابر وحقة وحرية الصحافة بلطمية زار

2011-03-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

مايورين: قطر واسيادها في اسرائيل واوروبا وامريكا سقطوا

2011-03-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

الجزيرة: ثورة ليبيا مجرد فوفوزيلا مثلية لمونديال قطر

2011-03-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

ثورة ليبيا تتصدى للجزيرة رأس حربة العدوان الاوروبي

2011-03-13T12:43:00.000-07:00

In Search of Monsters

2011-03-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

MAUREEN DOWD

Published: March 12, 2011

The Iraq war hawks urging intervention in Libya are confident that there’s no way Libya could ever be another Iraq.

Of course, they never thought Iraq would be Iraq, either.

All President Obama needs to do, Paul Wolfowitz asserts, is man up, arm the Libyan rebels, support setting up a no-fly zone and wait for instant democracy.

It’s a cakewalk.

Didn’t we arm the rebels in Afghanistan in the ’80s? And didn’t many become Taliban and end up turning our own weapons on us? And didn’t one mujahadeen from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, go on to lead Al Qaeda?

So that worked out well.

Even now, with our deficit and military groaning from two wars in Muslim countries, interventionists on the left and the right insist it’s our duty to join the battle in a third Muslim country.

“It is both morally right and in America’s strategic interest to enable the Libyans to fight for themselves,” Wolfowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

You would think that a major architect of the disastrous wars and interminable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would have the good manners to shut up and take up horticulture. But the neo-con naif has no shame.

After all, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets last month, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

Gates boldly batted back the Cakewalk Brigade — which includes John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry — bluntly telling Congress last week: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”

Wolfowitz, Rummy’s No. 2 in W.’s War Department, pushed to divert attention from Afghanistan and move on to Iraq; he pressed the canards that Saddam and Osama were linked and that we were in danger from Saddam’s phantom W.M.D.s; he promised that the Iraq invasion would end quickly and gleefully; he slapped back Gen. Eric Shinseki when he said securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops; and he claimed that rebuilding Iraq would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues.

How wrong, deceptive and deadly can you be and still get to lecture President Obama on his moral obligations?

Wolfowitz was driven to invade Iraq and proselytize for the Libyan rebels partly because of his guilt over how the Bush I administration coldly deserted the Shiites and Kurds who were urged to rise up against Saddam at the end of the 1991 gulf war. Saddam sent out helicopters to slaughter thousands. (A NATO no-fly zone did not stop that.)

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is also monstrous, slaughtering civilians and hiring mercenaries to kill rebels.

It’s hard to know how to proceed, but in his rush, Wolfowitz never even seems to have a good understanding of the tribal thickets he wants America to wade into. In Foreign Affairs, Frederic Wehrey notes that “for four decades Libya has been largely terra incognita ... ‘like throwing darts at balloons in a dark room,’ as one senior Western diplomat put it to me.”

Leslie Gelb warns in The Daily Beast that no doubt some rebels are noble fighters, but some “could turn out to be thugs, thieves, and would-be new dictators. Surely, some will be Islamic extremists. One or more might turn into another Col. Qaddafi after gaining power. Indeed, when the good colonel led the Libyan coup in 1969, many right-thinking Westerners thought him to be a modernizing democrat.”

Reformed interventionist David Rieff, who wrote the book “At the Point of a Gun,” which criticizes “the messianic dream of remaking the world in either the image of American democracy or of the legal utopias of international human rights law,” told me that after Iraq: “America doesn’t have the credibility to make war in the Arab world. Our touch in this is actually counterproductive.”

He continued: “Qaddafi is a terrible man, but I don’t think it’s the business of the United States to overthrow him. Those who want America to support democratic movements and insurrections by force if necessary wherever there’s a chance of them succeeding are committing the United States to endless wars of altruism. And that’s folly.”

He quotes John Quincy Adams about America: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy ... she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

As for Wolfowitz, Rieff notes drily, “He should have stayed a mathematician

خنفر يسوق جثة علي حسن الجابر ويطمئن مرتزقة الجزيرة

2011-03-12T12:56:00.000-08:00

علي حسن الجابر وبيبه ولد امهادي: علاقة مثلية وهرتقة

2011-03-12T12:55:00.001-08:00

مقتل اجير الجزيرة علي حسن الجابر

2011-03-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

محاولة لوقف اجتياح زومبيات الجزيرة لليبيا عمرالمختار

2011-03-12T12:54:00.000-08:00

Pack Journalism Promotes War on Libya

2011-03-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Lendman

America's major media never met an imperial war it didn't love and promote, never mind how lawless, mindless, destructive and counterproductive.

Despite Washington already bogged down in two losing ones, Obama's heading for another on Libya, the media pack in the lead clamoring for it, perhaps by "shock and awe," supplemented by special forces death squads on the ground recruiting, inciting, and arming opposition elements.

Notably favoring intervention, a New York Times February 24 editorial headlined, "Stopping Qaffafi," saying:

Unless he's stopped, he'll "slaughter hundreds or even thousands of his own people in his desperation to hang on to power."

Where's the Times outrage over millions Washington slaughtered, hundreds more killed daily, its ties to global despots, its funding and support for Israeli brutality against Palestinians, and its imperial insanity to achieve unchallengeable global dominance, no matter how many corpses it takes to do it.

Nonetheless, The Times hailed Libyan courage, asking for more Western support, implying the belligerent kind. "Colonel Qaddafi and his henchmen have to be told in credible and very specific terms the price they will pay for any more killing. They need to start paying now. (The) longer the world temporizes, the more people die."

On February 28, The Times editorial headlined, "Qaddafi's Crimes and Fantasies," saying:

His "crimes continue to mount. Rebel commanders said (his) warplanes bombed rebel-controlled areas in the eastern part of the country." However, Russian satellite imagery showed no bombing evidence or destruction on the ground. So much for The Times or other major media credibility, reporting the same unverified accounts.

On March 8, The Times headlined, "Washington's Options on Libya," saying:

"....some way must be found to support Libya's uprising and stop (Gaddafi) from slaughtering his people....It would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."

Indisputably, Gaddafi is a despot, but he didn't initiate conflict. Western powers did, sending in covert intelligence and special forces to incite, arm and support it.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that UK commandos were in Benghazi. So did Foreign Secretary William Hague, telling Parliament it was "a serious misunderstanding," drawing laughs from opposition benches.

Channel 4 News aired a video with him saying intelligence and elite special forces were on "a diplomatic mission" to make contact with rebel elements. However, he left unexplained why they arrived secretly by helicopter at 2AM with no advance warning. In fact, the Cameron/Hague "misunderstanding" came to enlist and incite violence along with US special forces there for the same purpose. Commandos are trained killers, not diplomats.

As a result, Gaddafi responded in self-defense. Washington and NATO bear full responsibility for growing daily casualties. Blood's on their hands. It's their cross to bear, costing many Libyan lives.

It hardly matters for greater stakes, including:

-- replacing one despot with another;

-- preventing democratization;

-- colonizing Libya;

-- controlling its oil, gas and other resources;

-- privatizing its state industries, handing them over to Western interests;

-- perhaps balkanizing the country like Yugoslavia and Iraq - in other words, effectively destroying it for profit and control, as well as using it as a platform to intimidate other regional states to comply fully with Western diktats - or else; and

-- exploiting its people ruthlessly as serf labor.

It's a familiar Western scheme, justified as "humanitarian intervention," what America, above all, doesn't give a damn about and never did, seeking only imperial dominance, no matter how much death and destruction it takes to get it. "Operation Libya" had antecedents, notably in Yugoslavia and Iraq, two previous countries Western powers destroyed and now exploit.

International Law on Self-Defense and External Intervention - Humanitarian or Otherwise

International law authorizes Gaddafi to respond in self-defense. Article 51 of the UN Charter's Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression" states:

"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security."

In other words, self-defense is permissible. Moreover, the UN Charter explains under what conditions intervention, violence and coercion (by one state against another) are justified. Article 2(3) and Article 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use, including no-fly zones that are acts of war.

In addition, Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 absolutely prohibit any unilateral or other external threat or use of force not specifically allowed under Article 51 or otherwise authorized by the Security Council.

Three General Assembly resolutions also prohibit non-consensual belligerent intervention, including:

-- the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty;

-- the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations; and

-- the 1974 Definition of Aggression.

Under no circumstances, with no exceptions, may one nation, NATO, or other combination of nations intervene against another without specific Security Council authorization. Doing so is illegal aggression, a lawless act of war. Washington and NATO have already initiated conflict. Gaddafi, or any other democrat or despot, legally may respond in self-defense as he's doing, love him or hate him. By law, he's justified.

Yet The Times urges NATO to expand "its air surveillance over Libya (and) share relevant information with the rebels." No matter that violating its air space is illegal and aggressive. The Times also wants pressure put on "Qaddafi and his cronies to cede power," by what authority it didn't say because there is none. No matter because in Times-think, "(i)t would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."

Hyperbole, misinformation, imperial support, and disdain for international and US laws as well as democratic values are Times specialties - on display backing Washington's attempt to destroy, colonize and exploit another country, no matter the corpse count to do it.

In his March 9 commentary, longtime insider Bob Chapman said the following:

"....as we pointed out after the Tunisian episode, this was the beginning of CIA, MI6 and Mossad planned activities in the Middle East. As usual there were several objectives. The first was a distraction to cover up (Western) financial troubles....The second was to remove Mubarak from his dictatorial position, because (he refused) to participate and agree to an invasion of Iran and to cause chaos in the region, so that (Iranian allies) would not give it assistance in the event of war."

"There was also the matter of controlling Libya's oil and toppling its dictator Gaddafi....From behind the scenes, (new leadership will emerge) tied to the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad. (These plans) have been in the works for years." Unrest will continue. "A solution will be found for Libya, and the west hopes its puppet (Saudi) regime stays in place." If disruption occurs there, America will intervene. Turmoil will continue for some time. "It won't take long for Mr. Gaddafi to be deposed and sent on his way," perhaps by US troops.

More Major Media War Endorsements

With total editorial control, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal aggressively backs imperial wars, notably now against Libya. On February 23, it editorial headlined, "Liberating Libya," saying:

"The US and Europe should help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime," replacing him, of course, with a Western favored despot, ceding control to imperial interests.

On March 6, the Journal headlined, "Obama's Libyan Abdication," asking:

"Will the US let Gadhafi slaughter his way back to power? The greatest danger now to US interests - and to Obama's political standing - would be for (him) to regain control....isolated and dangerous (he'll) likely (abet) terrorists," hyperbole exceeding The New York Times and most other corporate sources.

Not far behind, a February 21 Washington Post editorial screamed, "Moammar Gaddafi must pay for his atrocities," calling them "genocide." It was the same deception used before, including against Slobodan Milosevic to justify NATO's punishing 1999 illegal aggression to complete its long-planned Yugoslavia balkanization, defended then as "humanitarian intervention," no matter the vast destruction and loss of lives it caused.

The Post's resident zealot, Charles Krauthammer, called Gaddafi "a capricious killer" in his March 4 "Baghdad to Benghazi" article, saying he's "delusional, unstable and crazy."

On March 8, the Post's Marc Thiessen headlined, "Apply the Reagan Doctrine in Libya," by arming opposition elements, and inciting violence to topple Gaddafi the way Reagan operated in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and Central America, notably against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and FMLN in El Salvador, killing countless tens of thousands in the process, a record airbrushed from official history, calling imperial slaughter "liberation."

Arming Libya's Opposition

On March 7, London Independent writer Robert Fisk headlined, "America's secret plan to arm Libya's rebels," saying:

Washington asked "Saudi Arabia (to) supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi." In the 1980s, Saudis helped arm Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan and Contra forces in Central America. Asking Saudi help lets Washington deny involvement, perhaps impossible with Fisk breaking the news. He also said "US Awacs surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya" for days, violating its air space illegally.

Moreover, he noted an "Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt, and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US (UK, and NATO) priorities in the region." They augur no good for Libyans for sure.

A Final Comment

At times, Al Jazeera sounds like BBC, falling short of what viewers deserve. On February 18, Professor As'ad AbuKhalil's Angry Arab News Service discussed its coverage, saying:

"I am seething. The coverage of Aljazeera Arabic has become too blatantly politically biased for my taste. They protect their allies and friends and go intensely after the rivals and enemies of Qatar (where it's based) like the regime of Hosni Mubarak."

When GCC countries "decided to back the Bahrain monarchy, Aljazeera quickly reflected that. It is not a story anymore. Aljazeera is extensively covering Libya and Yemen now: not close allies of Qatar. If Mubarak was a member of the GCC, he would have been protected by Aljazeera."

Nonetheless, its service is vastly superior to US corporate news, offering entirely propaganda, sanitized reports and infotainment, a worthless mix to be avoided and condemned.

Reaching 40 million viewers, The New York Times called Al Jazeera "the bete noire" of Arab governments (shaping) popular rage against oppressive American-backed Arab governments (and against Israel) ever since its (1996) founding."

In their recent study on "How Al Jazeera Shapes Political Identities," Erik Nisbet and Teresa Myers found that exposure to Arabic media weakens national identities and strengthens Muslim and Arab ones.

Asked how it affects Middle East protests, Nisbet said:

"In the short term, the Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab narratives typically embedded in Al Jazeera content, in combination with growing Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab identification among Arab audiences, most likely facilitate the contagion begun by the Tunisian revolt."

The long-term implications for US foreign policy are also significant, posing "a serious challenge for Egyptian relations with the United States and Israel." Perhaps also for America's regional agenda. The "greater political liberalization combined with the growth of transnational political identification may challenge the United States to enact foreign policy within a regional context dominated by transnational political identities whose interests may be more opposed, or at least less amenable, to US foreign policy goals compared to state-centric identities."

Anything weakening Washington's dominance anywhere is important. Hopefully, Al Jazeera will promote and encourage it by more forcefully opposing imperial intervention, especially by belligerence and occupation.

That would make its service invaluable.

الهند تفضح تدليسات اوروبا والجزيرة على ثورات الحرية

2011-03-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

عائشة القذافي فارسة عربية وليست مجرد موزة آل سكند

2011-03-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

ليبيا: نعم لثورة الحرية وتركيا ولا للمعارضة وفرنسا

2011-03-11T11:58:00.002-08:00

ليبيا: نعم لثورة الحرية وتركيا ولا للمعارضة وفرنسا

2011-03-11T11:58:00.001-08:00

ليبيا: نعم لثورة الحرية وتركيا ولا للمعارضة وفرنسا

2011-03-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

سيف الكفر القذافي يروج التدخل الاوروبي وكلينتون تتصدى

2011-03-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

Excerpt: "Against Us" by Jim Sciutto

2011-03-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

Sept. 11, 2008

Jim Sciutto, a foreign correspondent for ABC News, examines the sources and repercussions of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, the new face of terrorism and options for the future

From firsthand experience and intimate interviews, Sciutto presents an engrossing narrative of terrifying events and inspiring hope.

Introduction

For five years, I've lived in Notting Hill— home to fashion boutiques, gourmet delicatessens, Park Avenue rents, and half a dozen guys planning for martyrdom. My neighbors are terrorists. I found out the first time in July 2005. After attempting and failing to blow themselves up on the London subway, three young British Muslims were captured in an apartment just down the street from me and right around the corner from the Travel Book Shop, where Hugh Grant's character worked in the movie Notting Hill. In perfect Notting Hill style, I'd sped by their place on my Vespa coming back from the gym just before the police swooped in. When the ABC desk called me with the news, I went to the scene still wearing my sneakers and sweats.

The story quickly burst the posh, hip, and safe bubble I had created for myself in London. Through all the wars and terror attacks overseas, I had imagined my neighborhood as a terror-free zone. Standing there on the corner of Lancaster and Portobello Roads that morning, I could see my favorite place for brunch, my favorite Italian restaurant, and my gym. It was like finding out that the next nineteen hijackers were living in the West Village.

London's collective sense of security had already been shattered two weeks earlier, when four other British men detonated bombs on three subway trains and a bus across the capital. Those attackers had been successful, killing ?fty-two people and themselves. As an American, I marveled at Britain's calm. London was shocked but not frozen. The buses and trains started running again almost immediately. Friends kept their dinner dates that night. Londoners proudly recalled the Second World War: We survived the blitz, we can survive this. But this time the threat came from home. Britain's own people were killing their fellow citizens. And these were good British boys, with jobs, families, favorite soccer teams, and unmistakably British accents

There would be other chilling reminders of this threat every few months. In August 2006, a plot was uncovered in Waltham Forest, East London, to blow up half a dozen airliners over the Atlantic using chemicals carried on board in soda bottles. If the alleged planners had been successful, they would have killed thousands: a 9/11 over the sea. In February 2007, Scotland Yard foiled a plan in Birmingham to kidnap and behead British Muslim soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Several newspapers shared a single headline for the story: baghdad comes to birmingham. Each plot seemed more sinister than the last. In July 2007, two men tried to detonate car bombs outside two London nightclubs. When the bombs failed, they drove ten hours to Scotland to set themselves on ?re outside the departure terminal at Glasgow International Airport. Like the Birmingham suspects, they had intended to bring Iraqi-like violence home to the British people. But this conspiracy had a new twist: the attackers were doctors. And they were my neighbors as well. Two of them had addresses just down the street from me, again, in idyllic Notting Hill.

What worried me was that the hate—against Britain, against America, against the West (they make little distinction)—had become a part of the fabric of everyday life. In early 2002, I had embarked on an educational tour of the Arab World as a foreign correspondent for ABC News. After 9/11, I knew we had dangerous enemies in the region. But they were, I thought, easily identi?able: terrorists, radical imams, in?ltrators from faraway places. One hundred assignments later, from the Caucasus in the north, down through Afghanistan and Iran, the Persian Gulf, and into the Middle East, I was changed, even ?oored. In Afghanistan and Jordan I'd met Al-Qaeda ?ghters who told me it was their dream to kill me. That was no surprise. But for everyone from Egyptian democracy activists to Iraqis who had once supported the U.S. invasion to "pro-western" Lebanese lawmakers, America seemed to have perfected some sort of perverse art in alienating people.

I'd already spent several years in Asia after college, so I'd learned to shed any conceit that Americans were always, or even usually, perceived as the good guys. People in many countries can remember a time when they were up and we were down, and long for history to repeat itself. I also knew that anti-Americanism is a convenient tool for governments. The United States as foreign menace is a nice distraction from poverty, corruption, and utter failure at home. Still, among Muslims there is something distinct and demoralizing about their anti-American sentiment. Many Muslims I've met have long believed that the United States is trying to control their lives, nearly always with the worst intentions. They don't blame me personally. They usually make the distinction between the American people and their politicians (though that distinction is fading). But they do treat me as America's of?cial spokesman, or as its defense attorney in an international court of public opinion where the facts as we see them don't matter much. Here, the September 11 attacks were a joint plot of the CIA and Israeli intelligence. Violence in Iraq is not failed policy, but a deliberate American plan to occupy Muslim land and steal oil. The Israel-Lebanon War was a brazen attempt by the United States and Israel to send a violent message to Muslims by killing Lebanese civilians. Such assumptions extend even to native-born European Muslims. Among many British Muslims, the July 7 London subway bombers weren't murderers, but innocent young men framed by the police (though they'll often add that Britain deserved the attacks anyway).

After seven years of reporting on this subject, I came to an unsettling truth: The Al-Qaeda-inspired view of an evil America bent on destroying Islam has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. Today, America's enemies are not the wild-eyed radicals I had imagined, but are often moderates—and many of those whom we thought were our friends are now some of our most virulent detractors.

Positive views of America—already anemic—have grown slimmer and slimmer. A 2007 poll by the U.S.-based Program on International Policy Attitudes in four Muslim countries (Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia) found that 79 percent believe the United States seeks to "weaken and divide the Islamic world." Strong majorities (64 percent on average) even believe it is a U.S. goal to "spread Christianity in the region."

Between 2002 and 2007, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that the number of people who rated the United States favorably declined in twenty-six of thirty-three countries. By 2007, in nine countries less than 30 percent of the population rated the United States positively. Eight of them were predominantly Muslim: Turkey, Pakistan, Palestine, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Argentina was the odd man out).

In more than thirty years as a pollster, Andrew Kohut, the president and director of the Pew Research Center, has said he could find no frame of reference for the current decline.

"We don't have any experience with this. We never got the breadth of discontent with America as we have now," he said. "In other countries, it's disappointment, resentment, envy. Among Muslims, it ranges from strong dislike to hatred."

Increasingly, negative views of America as a country are extending to the American people. Another Pew poll found that fewer than one-third of Egyptians, Moroccans, Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Turks have a favorable view of Americans, characterizing us as greedy, violent, and immoral.

Just after 9/11, President Bush declared nations around the world "with us or against us" in the war on terror. Now those in the Muslim world are against us in greater numbers than ever before—and they have a new face. A remarkable variety of people—normal people—believe the United States intentionally obstructs rather than promotes progress. Al-Qaeda may be losing the military campaign, but, in considerable ways, it is winning the ideological war. "Al-Qaeda's ideological claims now have credibility, that the West is waging war against Islam," said Fawaz Gerges, a longtime Middle East analyst. "There is a crusading spirit in the West. It helps shape the Muslim view that the U.S. is trying to control their lives. The U.S. is convinced Al-Qaeda is an evildoer. Al-Qaeda has convinced Muslims that the U.S. is an evildoer too."

As an American, I found myself eager to raise the alarm at how deeply our image has been damaged and search for ways to repair it. I found some of the answers by getting to know some of the people who see every event of their lives affected—stage-managed, even—by the United States. For Iraqis, every car bombing has an American imprint. For Palestinians, it's every foot of the wall Israel has built along the border of the West Bank. For Afghans, it's the electricity that's still off most of the day. We have no connection to them, but they feel every connection to us. Their anger is as real as their humanity. These people aren't monsters. Through the profiles that follow, I hope to show how average people buy the conspiracy theories, answer "yes" when asked if America is seeking to weaken the Muslim world, and place more hope in holy war than in America

In the eyes of many Muslims, America is the victim of its own mistakes. The United States has lost its moral compass across the region. For them, the gap between what we preach and what we do has always been wide, but today it is unbridgeable. The Iraq War was the worst advertisement for American intervention. Torture matters. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib matter. Our relationships with dictatorships matter too. My Muslim friends laugh when we call Saudi Arabia and Egypt "moderate" regimes. This is why dissidents in Egypt today see their cause as stronger without America than with it. "Without you getting involved," a young Egyptian pro-democracy blogger told me, "we'd be fighting just [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak, not Mubarak and America."

There is a strange contradiction at the root of much of the hate: while they resent us, many Muslims remain in awe of American power—so much so that they believe U.S. failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the occupied territories were America's intention all along. Nothing else could explain the disparity between American promises and performance. As a result, the Iraqi trauma surgeon I've known since the invasion of Baghdad doesn't credit America for the calm after the surge. After five years of piecing together the war's victims, he is convinced America planned the mayhem from the start. He even believes the United States was behind many of the suicide bombings. To him, regardless of who's responsible, the deaths of more than 150,000 Iraqis (as estimated by the World Health Organization through 2006) was too high a price for his country to pay. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are nothing compared to what Al-Qaeda has done, but, held up against America's own standards, they are the crimes that have come to define us.

This feeling of being under attack has helped solidify a new Muslim identity—a new cause—of its own. Anti-Americanism is a form of Middle Eastern nationalism that transcends borders, even religion. That's why I easily found Christians in Lebanon who revere Hezbollah as devoutly as Shiite Muslims; they see it as resistance against American imperialism. Across the region and even among Muslims in Europe, hating America has become a modern-day youth movement. Hippies didn't trust anyone over thirty. Muslims have learned not to trust anything American.

As Americans, we can react self-righteously. I've lost my cool in dozens of café debates with Muslim friends. But that will not bring us closer to winning them over. The truth is, they see a different set of facts and a different world. Looking far past 9/11 and into the next presidency, Americans can wish the hostility away or look for the elements of it we can address. We had opportunities to turn the tide of hate: after 9/11, when much of the region unanimously opposed Al-Qaeda's brand of violent nihilism, and again in 2005, when elections in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf states gave some hope that the United States might be on to something.

Polling consistently shows that Muslims' priorities mirror ours: family, economic opportunity, reform, and a political system they can participate in. It's just that today they see America as standing in the way of those values, rather than promoting them. To us, freedom means elections. To many Arab Muslims, freedom means freedom from American influence.

There are ways we can save ourselves, I've been told, to turn the tide of hate. Sometimes the solutions are straightforward, such as putting roofs over the heads of students in Afghanistan or getting pro-democracy campaigners released from Egyptian prisons. More often they are long-term and complicated. "Many Muslims are still deeply enamored of America the idea," said Gerges.

There's the hope. Today, though, America the reality is a disappointment and a threat. This is the new philosophy— the new cause uniting disparate people in disparate places. America is the aggressor, the real impediment to peace, the enemy. And those standing up against us are not just masked gunmen in far-off desert hideouts. They are graduate students in Lebanon, democracy campaigners in Egypt, doctors in Iraq, and those young men in my neighborhood of Notting Hill. Their attitude toward the United States— and Americans—comes from years of living as unwilling subjects of our foreign policy. Their insight into our country is at times grounded in profound wisdom and experience. At other times it's based on pure bunk. But seeing through their eyes will help us understand their vision as well as America's position in the post-9/11, post-Iraq, post–George Bush world.

Unrest in Libya and the Middle East Is Costing the Russian Arms Industry

2011-03-10T14:34:00.000-08:00

MOSCOW — In its statements and actions, Russia has joined the international community in condemning the violence by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya against his citizens. But that has not stopped Russia from counting up its business losses from canceled arms sales to Libya

Russia will lose $4 billion because of the unrest in Libya and the subsequent United Nations embargo, Sergei V. Chemezov, the director of the Russian state company in charge of weapons exports, said on Friday.

Over all, unrest in the Middle East has toppled or threatens to topple several governments that are longtime customers of Russian military industries, Mr. Chemezov said, and the total losses could reach $10 billion.

The comments by Mr. Chemezov, a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, reflected the business calculations that are a world away from the pain of the conflicts on the ground.

He characterized the financial setbacks as “lost opportunity costs” so far because factories had not yet incurred outlays to build the orders for Libya. In 2008, Russia waived Libya’s Soviet-era debt in exchange for new weapons orders.

“We signed contracts, but they had not yet taken effect,” he said. “The money we could have received, but we will not receive, is about $4 billion.”

Mr. Chemezov declined to say what was on Libya’s new order list, but he said recently that Russia had shipped mostly spare parts for the country’s Soviet-built weaponry.

Through his job at the giant Russian state company Rostekhnologia, Mr. Chemezov is one of the world’s largest arms dealers. He expressed regret that Libyan weapons may now find their way onto the black market, and he took pains to emphasize that Russia adheres strictly to United Nations rules in its sales of lethal machinery around the world.

Russia supported the arms embargo that was recently imposed by the United Nations Security Council, despite knowing the cost to its domestic industries, he said.

“We are a civilized country,” Mr. Chemezov said. “We understand that any violation of human rights, whichever side is doing it, whatever our friendly relations with them, all the same, we need to support the people, the simple people. We cannot allow them to kill people for no reason.”

When the sanctions took effect, Mr. Chemezov said that Rostekhnologia immediately turned around a ship laden with aircraft spare parts that was bound for Libya, though it “had nearly reached Libyan shores.”

Russia is hardly alone in suffering or risking setbacks because of the overthrow of authoritarian governments in the Middle East.

The Libyan Army filled its now partially looted arsenals with weapons from France, the United States, Sweden, North Korea and other countries, according to an assessment by Jane’s Information Group. Libya also has obtained weaponry from the European defense contractor BAE Systems; the American defense company Raytheon; a branch of Saab of Sweden; and Beretta, the Italian gunsmith, according to Jane’s.

International weapons experts have expressed concern in particular about photographs showing rebels carrying looted, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that look like they are from the former Eastern bloc. If they were to fall into the hands of terrorists on the black market, these missiles could pose a danger to civilian airliners.

Mr. Chemezov said Russia was probably not the culprit in the dissemination of these weapons. Russia, he said, has sold no shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons to Libya since the Soviet Union fell, though it may have provided them before 1992, in which case they would be obsolete.

Mr. Chemezov said he had seen estimates that Russia would lose as much as $10 billion if the United Nations expanded arms embargoes to other Middle Eastern or North African countries.

Where could the Russian industry, in particular, turn to cover this loss?

“There is always Latin America,” he said

غنج قواد الجزيرة ماجد عبدالهادي لترويج سموم لندنستان

2011-03-10T14:30:00.000-08:00

القذافي يقصف النفط وبن جواد والحظر الجوي ليس حلا

2011-03-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

كلينتون: مع التحرك الليبي العربي لا البريطاني الفرنسي

2011-03-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

The Circle: Imprisoned Iranian Director’s Films on Display

2011-03-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

It is good to be a man in Iran, provided you do not care about religious, political, or economic liberty. However, women must endure a profoundly misogynistic and frequently brutal society that regards them as little more than the chattel of men.

Jafar Panahi confronted the unjustness of Iran’s treatment of women directly in “The Circle,” the winner of the 2000 Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion. The film was promptly banned in Iran.

Not content to stop there, the Iranian government has recently barred Panahi from further filmmaking for the next 20 years and sentenced him to six years in prison. Indeed, Panahi’s circumstances only heighten the poignancy of “The Circle,” which screens in New York on Friday, March 11, as the concluding film of the Asia Society’s retrospective-tribute to the persecuted filmmaker.

The film tribute couldn’t be timelier, considering the unrest in the Middle East and North Africa.

Solmaz Gholami (remember that name) has just given birth to a healthy baby girl. This should be happy news, but her mother is distraught. The in-laws were expecting a boy and will surely abandon their daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

The obvious high school science fact that it was the husband who failed to supply the Y-chromosome is lost on such medieval fundamentalists. As Gholami’s mother seeks help from her family, “The Circle” peels off, focusing on its next set of characters.

Three women have just been released from prison on unspecified “morals” charges. However, the Iranian system sets them up in a perverse Catch-22, kicking them loose without the necessary identification papers should they be stopped once again by the police (who are definitely out hunting for women in their situation).

Lacking a male chaperone, sweet-tempered Nargess cannot take the bus trip back to her provincial home. Despondent, she seeks another friend, Pari, an escapee with even greater problems. She is four months pregnant with the child of her executed lover. From Pari, the chain continues, introducing a desperate mother and a woman arrested as a prostitute, who ultimately brings the story to its symmetrical conclusion.

Sexism is a wholly insufficient term for the abuses “The Circle” dramatizes. A stinging indictment, but also an honest, frequently moving human drama, it is not hard to see how it ran afoul of the state censors. Yet, the film is not just a testament to Panahi’s artistic integrity. The cast deserves tremendous credit, especially those playing fallen women while living in a literal-minded fundamentalist theocracy.

Though “The Circle” is the only credit listed on the IMDb website for many of the actresses, their work has a powerful immediacy. They are frighteningly believable. Yet, perhaps most haunting is Nargess Mamizadeh as her namesake. Young and innocent, to paraphrase the tagline of one of the film’s international posters, she could only be guilty of being a woman.

To be banned by the mullahs might be a greater accolade than the raft of awards “The Circle” has won on the international festival circuit. Of course, the repercussions for Panahi have been severe.

A truly bold film, “The Circle” has only appreciated in importance and relevance with the regime’s campaign against the filmmaker. Highly recommended

No-Fly Zone in Libya, One Step Away From War

2011-03-10T09:29:00.000-08:00

Rebels are calling on the international community to protect civilians with a no-fly zone over Libya, ensuring Moammar Gadhafi’s forces cannot use air strikes against them. While the Obama administration is wavering over steps to establish a no-fly zone, its NATO partners and co-United Nations Security Council members—mainly the U.K. and France—have drafted a resolution proposing terms.

The main question for the West is whether the no-fly zone is the first step to yet another war in the region.

Ambassador (Ret.) Robert Hunter, a senior adviser with the RAND Corporation and former U.S. ambassador to NATO says in theory the operation could be as simple as declaring a no-fly zone, and then “use aircraft with standoff weapons and shoot airplanes down.”

“It may be that just declaring and starting to do that will lead Libyan pilots to say they don’t want to fly anymore,” he speculated.

Hunter says Libya’s facilities that fire long-range, surface-to-air missiles may not even need to be destroyed. He says that with these facilities “you might not go after all of them, but you might say, ‘if any of them turn their radars on we will destroy them.’”

But even if the operation is short and tidy, Hunter makes no bones about the fact that it still constitutes “military intervention” in Libya.

Policy director of Global Security.org, John Pike, thinks military action to knock out Libya’s air defenses and maintain the no-fly zone would be straightforward.

"If we are just talking about hot steel on-target, if you are simply talking at the tactical level, how many bombs have to be dropped, or at the operational level, how many fighter planes have to be available, I think it is pretty straightforward and not that hard to do.”

Although it’s conceivable that a no-fly zone might not involve an outright act of war, Pike points out that once the military is there bombing missile launch facilities and shooting down planes, the possibility for civilian deaths exists.

“If over time, if you’re going to enforce this, then there’s always the possibility of civilian casualties.”

According to Pike, in this scenario, the no-fly action could become a war.

“If there was minimal possibility of civilian casualties it would not be war, it would be law enforcement. We know that it is war because we know that the innocent will die."

Defense Secretary Gates also thinks that a no-fly zone could effectively become war in Libya.

Testifying in the House last week, Gates warned that a no-fly zone would require “a big operation in a big country.”

“A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defenses. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts,” said Gates.

On Tuesday, Secretary State Hillary Clinton said the United States won’t spearhead the no-fly move on its own, but would go along with an international effort.

“I think it’s very important that this not be a U.S.-led effort, because this comes from the people of Libya themselves. This doesn’t come from the outside,” said Clinton.

Also Tuesday, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a body of 57 states promoting Muslim interests, met and decided the OIC is “against any form of military intervention to Libya.”

Even so, the conference “will further review the latest developments in Libya” and consider supporting an international effort to establish a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians.

Maintaining a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace could become a prolonged campaign. Recently Gadhafi said Libya will fight back against such a measure.

Speaking Wednesday on Turkey’s state-run TRT news, Gadhafi played up the propaganda value of the proposed no-fly zone. He said it would be “useful for Libya, because the Libyan people will see the truth, that what they [the West] want is to take control of Libya and to steal [the people’s] oil.”

“The Libyan people will take up arms against them," Gadhafi threatened

Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions in Carl Sagan's "Earth the Pale Blue Dot"

2011-03-07T18:06:00.000-08:00

محاولة بريطانية فاشلة لاجهاض ثورة ليبيا

2011-03-07T17:28:00.000-08:00

Can You Hear Libya Now

2011-03-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

By DAN GONZALES and SARAH HARTING

AS Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi tightens his grip on the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and the millions of people trapped inside, the world is debating how it can help the opposition, including no-flight zones and air strikes.

But there’s a less aggressive, though perhaps even more important, step we can take: ensuring that Libyans can communicate with the outside world.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and communications devices like camera-enabled cellphones have been important tools for protesters in the revolutions that are rocking Arab countries. This is particularly true in countries like Libya that lack opposition political parties or even formal opposition movements, requiring protesters to build communications networks literally overnight.

Perhaps that’s why, since the Libyan demonstrations started last month, Internet access and cellphone service in Libya has severely deteriorated — the work, many suspect, of the government, since Colonel Qaddafi’s son Muhammad runs the country’s satellite and cellphone communications companies. Huge portions of the population are now frequently unable to complete cellphone calls or gain access to the Internet.

Loyalists to Colonel Qaddafi are also reported to have confiscated cellphones or deleted photographs on them to prevent the spread of images from the uprising.

As a result, democracy demonstrators have had a harder time communicating with one another, while foreign correspondents in Libya have found it nearly impossible to report on events fully.

Colonel Qaddafi and his loyalists, meanwhile, can use the military communication networks they control to counter rebel forces.

Fortunately, there is an easy step the United States and its allies could take to help: deploying cellphone base stations on aircraft or tethered balloons. The calls could then be routed to Navy ships equipped with satellite communications terminals.

Base stations are small and cheap. Indeed, this kind of portable system, though not used, was already available in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and in the years since the hurricane, the equipment has shrunk even further.

Ideally, a commercial cellphone operator would provide direct access to its network, and either the operator, the American government or the international community could foot the bill.

What’s more, establishing such a network would present minimal risk to pilots, who could loiter safely over the Mediterranean and still provide coverage to the coast, where the overwhelming majority of Libyans live and where most of the fighting is.

It’s true that such a communications system would require military protection. But because only a small number of communications aircraft would have to be defended, the size of the protected zone would be small — much smaller than the no-flight zones imposed on the Saddam Hussein regime after the gulf war.

Moreover, the effort would give the international community a flexible starting point in case further intervention is necessary, whether to engage with the Libyan military or provide assistance to refugees.

By ensuring that Libyans maintain access to these basic services, the United States and the rest of the world would not only assist in the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, but they would also send a strong message of support to those elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa fighting for their voices to be heard.

*Dan Gonzales is a senior scientist and Sarah Harting is a project associate at the RAND Corporation

ثورة الحرية في ليبيا وسموم البي بي سي الخبيثة

2011-03-07T16:23:00.000-08:00

ثورة ليبيا: كر وفر والعاقبة للمتقين

2011-03-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

Pope prays for Libya الفاتيكان يدعو للسلام والاغاثة لليبيا

2011-03-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

ملكة الاعلام أمانبور: مع الحق والسلم والجزيرة مع الحرب

2011-03-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

الجزيرة وقطر وايران اكبر داعم لاستبداد القذافي

2011-03-06T12:31:00.000-08:00

Qaddafi Christiane Amanpour Interview Top Ten القذافي - كريستيان أمانبور

2011-03-06T12:30:00.001-08:00

Qaddafi Christiane Amanpour Interview Top Ten القذافي - كريستيان أمانبور

2011-03-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

Libya’s Late, Great Rights Record

2011-03-06T12:15:00.000-08:00

Until Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s violent suppression of unrest in recent weeks, the United Nations Human Rights Council was kind in its judgment of Libya. In January, it produced a draft report on the country that reads like an international roll call of fulsome praise, when not delicately suggesting improvements. Evidently, within the 47-nation council, some pots are loath to call kettles black, at least until events force their hand. Last week Libya was suspended from the body, and the report was shelved. Here are excerpts

• Algeria noted the efforts of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya [people’s republic] to promote human rights, which reflected the country’s commitment to complying with Human Rights Council resolutions and cooperating with the international community.

• Qatar praised the legal framework for the protection of human rights and freedoms, including, inter alia, its criminal code and criminal procedure law, which provided legal guarantees for the implementation of those rights.

• The Syrian Arab Republic praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its serious commitment to and interaction with the Human Rights Council and its mechanisms.

• [North Korea] praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its achievements in the protection of human rights, especially in the field of economic and social rights, including income augmentation, social care, a free education system, increased delivery of health care services, care for people with disabilities, and efforts to empower women.

• Bahrain noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had adopted various policies aimed at improving human rights, in particular the right to education and the rights of persons with disabilities.

• Iraq commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for being a party to most international and regional human rights instruments, which took precedence over its national legislation.

• Saudi Arabia commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s achievements in its constitutional, legislative and institutional frameworks, which showed the importance that the country attached to human rights.

• Tunisia noted progress made by the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, such as the adoption of the Great Green Charter, which was very comprehensive and enshrined fundamental freedoms and rights as enshrined in international human rights instruments.

• The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela acknowledged the efforts of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya to promote economic, social and cultural rights, especially those of children.

• Cuba commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for the progress made in the achievement of one of the millennium development goals, namely, universal primary education.

• Egypt commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for progress in building a comprehensive national human rights framework of institutions and in drafting legislation and supporting its human resources in that area.

• The Islamic Republic of Iran noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had implemented a number of international human rights instruments and had cooperated with relevant treaty bodies.

• Myanmar commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its economic and social progress, and recognized efforts in domestic legislation aimed at guaranteeing equal rights.

• The United States of America supported the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s increased engagement with the international community. It called on the country to comply with its human rights treaty obligations.

• The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya invited all nongovernmental organizations and other relevant stakeholders in the council to visit the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya so they could see in person the status of human rights on the ground

الثورة تسقط طائرة في راس لانوف وخميس يهزم في الزاوية

2011-03-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

تاجوراء - طرابلس للقذافي: نتحداك هنا ونواصل

2011-03-05T09:15:00.000-08:00

ثورة ليبيا تسيطرعلى راس لانوف مسهلة الزحف للعزيزية

2011-03-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

اللواء سليمان: سنقتلع القذافي لتبقى ليبيا حرة عربية

2011-03-04T21:02:00.000-08:00

هام: عزيز ابوسارة: ثورة الحرية في ليبيا ليست حرب اهلية

2011-03-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

انتفاضة طرابلس ليبيا: نحن رماة الحجر الباسل

2011-03-04T19:30:00.000-08:00

حماس: خطاب ونشيد تافه وتسريحة شعر

2011-03-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

ثورة مصر مستمرة: لا تزعجوا قطعان الجزيرة

2011-03-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

ماجدات اليمن في قيادة ثورة الحرية

2011-03-04T10:48:00.000-08:00

بريقة تصد هجوم مرتزقة القذافي برا وجوا وتأسرهم

2011-03-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

امريكا وروسيا مع ترحيل القذافي لتجنب العنف والحرب

2011-03-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

Egypt Revolution ثورة مصر

2011-03-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

TV sets agenda in coverage of Arab uprisings

2011-03-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

The Libyan uprising has been a triumph for both 24-hour news channels and for terrestrial TV's normal news programming. Similarly, the television reports of the daily demonstrations in Cairo brought the story of the Egyptian revolt alive in a way that no other media platform could match

In times past, I have been critical of 24-hour television news. Aside from the understandable repetition, the speculative nature of much of the output is both frustrating and journalistically suspect.

I have also registered my lack of enthusiasm for some of the regular news output, not least those annoying times when the news anchor in the studio is forced to stage a live interview with the correspondent out on the road.

That nonsensical practice rarely, if ever, adds anything to the reporter's original report.

But the TV coverage within Libya and Egypt has captured the spirit of the protests so brilliantly that I've been finding myself in front of the television far more often than usual. You get a real sense of the mix of uninhibited enthusiasm and worrying incoherence.

Admittedly, I'm a news junkie.

When big international stories break I want to know what's happening, not only as quickly as possible, but I want to see it happen.

I have noted - who could not? - that social media have had a special role to play, especially in Egypt and Tunisia. Twitter, particularly, has been used by the people to mobilise, to warn and to inform. That is excellent and I'm not about to get into a silly argument about new media versus old media.

In the modern world media platforms are complimentary. No-one believes that it is possible to receive intelligent analysis in 140 characters. Similarly, we are aware that newsprint newspapers are out of date by the time they hit the mat every morning (less so for evening papers like this one, of course).

Meanwhile, with running stories, there is little doubt that television is invaluable. Sometimes, as during the invasion of Iraq, TV suffers from not being able to go where it likes. Its reporters and camera operators are subject to restrictions, especially when embedding is the order of the day.

By contrast, popular uprisings, such as those currently occurring across the Middle East, offer the opportunity to tell a moving story without the dead hand of "the authorities" preventing journalistic inquiry.

I was switching between the BBC's news channel, Sky News and al Jazeera English yesterday and admiring the way their reporters were doing their best to explain the complexities of the Libyan situation.

On-the-spot reports from various Libyan cities caught the excitement and the chaos, as did the coverage of the situation from the increasingly fractious groups of people massing at the Libya-Tunisian border.

There were, of course, speculative elements, with a range of "experts" giving their opinions. Were Gaddafi's forces really retaking cities that had fallen to the rebels? Would a no-fly zone be introduced? Would there be further seizures of Gaddafi's assets? There was also the inevitable use of loop-tape film at times. That was offset by a freshness that made the watching experience more than usually rewarding.

Most interesting of all has been the way Gaddafi has been using TV.

His son, Saif, helped a special press conference in Tripoli for the BBC's Jeremy Bowen, ITN's Bill Neeley and members of the US networks, having ensured that they reached the city before any newspaper reporter.

Then Gaddafi gave a joint interview to Bowen and to ABC's star reporter, Christiane Amanpour, appearing to be amazingly relaxed in front of the cameras, speaking occasionally in English. It's true that Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times was there too, a correspondent who has met Gaddafi several times previously down the years, but the main platform for her work was days away. In the meantime, obviously eager not to lose the news value of what she learned, she gave radio and TV interviews about the meeting.

For example, she appeared on CNN to say that Gaddafi had probably staged the interview in order to dispel rumours that he had left Libya. However mad he sometimes may have appeared during his public rants, Gaddafi is very aware of the power of the western media.

He spent more than an hour with the three journalists, answering even the most provocative questions with apparent calm. There was one wonderful telling moment.

Amanpour asked him: "If you say they do love you, then why are they capturing Benghazi and saying they're against you?"

Gaddafi replied: "It's al Qaeda. It's not my people. They came from outside."

Bowen then said: "So they're the people pulling down the posters and putting up the flag of the king?"

This bit of film, part of which was shown on the main BBC TV news on Monday evening, showed that Gaddafi was in complete denial about the successful uprising against him elsewhere in his country.

We, the viewers, knew that because of the contrast between that TV interview and the parallel footage of the street protests - the flag-waving demonstrators, the effigies of Gaddafi hanging from on high, the children playing on tanks.

I have been particularly taken with the reports in Egypt, and now Libya, of the BBC's correspondent, Lyse Doucet, and the easy, conversational way she conducts interviews with people on the ground. How ever well newspaper reporters convey such interviews, there is nothing quite like seeing them on TV. They have an authenticity that is unmatchable in print.

I am aware that I might be sounding overly enthusiastic about television. I am not. I just want to place it in the correct context. In this volatile, unfolding news situation, it has been the leading media platform. It is, of course, complemented by newspapers offering long-form journalism - comment, interpretation and analysis - that helps to provide people with yet more insight.

We, in the west, are indeed fortunate to have such a rich media choice. When we witness the collapse of these totalitarian Arab states, it is something to celebrate

آمال بوقعيقيس: القذافي يستورد مرتزقة من السودان

2011-03-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

معارك طرابلس: ثورة فرسان الحرية وليست حرب اهلية

2011-03-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

ثورة الحرية لن تكون فرنسية: مصر ليبيا مانديلا

2011-03-02T08:48:00.003-08:00

ثورة الحرية لن تكون فرنسية: مصر ليبيا مانديلا

2011-03-02T08:48:00.002-08:00

ثورة الحرية لن تكون فرنسية: مصر ليبيا مانديلا

2011-03-02T08:48:00.001-08:00

ثورة الحرية لن تكون فرنسية: مصر ليبيا مانديلا

2011-03-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

Is There an Arab George Washington

2011-03-02T07:56:00.000-08:00

On learning that George Washington intended to follow up his victory at Yorktown by retiring to his farm at Mount Vernon, George III told the painter Benjamin West: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." The British monarch may have wound up stark raving mad, but he knew a thing or two about the seductions of power.

We celebrate Washington today as the greatest of the founding fathers. But the fame he gained during his lifetime owed mainly to his willingness to relinquish the vast powers he had repeatedly been granted, and which were his for the keeping. That's a rarity in the history of revolutions, in which the distance from liberation to despotism—from euphoria to terror—is usually short. The French Revolution began with a Declaration of the Rights of Man. It very nearly ended in an extinction of those rights.

The uprisings now sweeping the Arab world threaten to retrace that familiar arc. Consider the irony of last month's massive protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Until Egypt's corrupt but tolerant monarchy was overthrown in 1952, the square was known as Midan El-Ismailiya after Ismail Pasha, the great 19th-century Egyptian Westernizer. It became Liberation Square only after Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1952 coup, yet another calamitous revolution that began brightly with promises of democracy

Now we're being told that this time it's different. A day after the demonstrators began to gather on Tahrir Square last month, an Egyptian friend of mine—a former independent member of parliament with close ties to the secular opposition—explained that difference: "It's a revolution without papas," he told me. No Nasser, no Ben Bella, no Arafat, just ordinary people in their millions demanding their long-denied civil and political rights.

I'd love to think that my friend is right. And there's no shortage of pop-political philosophy explaining how in our networked, horizontal, spontaneously organizing era of Facebook and Twitter, there's no longer a need for credible leaders or effective political parties. Just click the install button on People Power 3.0 and the program will run itself.

Yet until technology recasts human nature, human nature will be what it always has been. And human nature abhors a leadership vacuum. When revolutions are successful, it's not that they have no "papas"; it's that they have good papas. So it was with Washington, or with Mandela—men of hard-earned and unmatched moral authority, steeped in the right values, who not only could defeat their adversaries but rein in the tempers of their own followers.

What happens when revolutions don't have such leaders? The French Revolution is Exhibit A. Exhibit B might be Lebanon's Cedar Revolution of 2005, which took place following the assassination of the charismatic former premier Rafik Hariri. Millions of Lebanese poured into Beirut's Martyrs' Square on March 14 to demand the end of Syrian occupation. The Syrians obliged. Elections gave pro-Western groups clear majorities in parliament. The country seemed settled on a better course.

In May of that year I went to Lebanon to see things for myself. "Wherever I go here, the impression is of a people intent on making up for lost time, and determined never again to be dragged down by extremism," I wrote. "It is these Lebanese, one senses, and not Hezbollah, who are making the country anew, and who are doing so, at long last, in the absence of fear."

Re-reading those lines today, with Hezbollah in firm control of a puppet government and the various leaders of the March 14 movement murdered, dismembered or politically neutered, is enough to make me cringe

But it's also a useful lesson in the limits of the very kind of people power now being celebrated in Egypt. It's not enough to be against, or to bring down, a hated regime. It's not even enough to be for something, at least in the sense in which the Arab world now seeks a freer and more representative political dispensation. What's required is the statesmanship that can give concrete form to a hazy political dream.

It would be nice to believe that this kind of statesmanship will emerge unbidden from decent quarters, which probably explains the fascination with Egyptian Google exec Wael Ghonim. But the perennial political problem is that good people usually lack political ambition. They cede the field to charlatans, romantics and jackals.

As Americans look at what is happening in the Middle East, it's natural that their sympathies should lie with the demonstrators. Natural, too, is the belief that movements consisting mainly of oppressed people in search of a better life will lead to decent regimes that care for those people. And maybe that will turn out to be true.

But also true is that America's revolutionary history was exceptional because we had a Washington while the French had a Robespierre and the Egyptians had a Nasser. We owe today's Arabs our optimism, and the benefit of the doubt. They owe themselves the real lessons of our example

Iran the Chosen Oppressive Regime!

2011-03-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

ثورة الحرية في ايران : مشهد : اعتقال موسوي وكروبي

2011-03-01T20:45:00.000-08:00

ثورة الحرية في ايران : مشهد : اعتقال موسوي وكروبي

2011-03-01T20:36:00.000-08:00